Dusk Network isn’t chasing anonymity or retail DeFi it’s engineering regulated privacy.
What’s structurally different right now:
Privacy with auditability baked into the base layer.
Dusk uses zero-knowledge proofs not to hide from regulators, but to satisfy them selectively. Ownership, balances, and trades stay confidential by default, yet can be cryptographically disclosed to auditors or regulators when required. That’s a fundamentally different design goal than Monero/Zcash-style privacy.
Built for tokenized securities, not memes or yield farms.
The core use case is confidential issuance and secondary trading of RWAs (equity, debt, funds). This is one of the few L1s architected around MiFID/MiCA-style constraints instead of trying to retrofit compliance later.
Zero-Knowledge Compliance (ZKC) as a primitive.
KYC/AML isn’t an app-layer workaround it’s provable on-chain without leaking PII. That matters for institutions who can’t touch public ledgers that expose positions.
Mainnet timing matters.
After years of R&D, mainnet went live late 2024 / early 2025. That flips Dusk from “theory-heavy privacy chain” to something pilots and regulated venues can actually deploy on.
Why builders and traders are watching now:
Builders see a rare chance to ship real capital markets workflows on-chain without violating disclosure laws.
Traders see asymmetric optionality: if regulated tokenization gains traction in the EU, networks that already satisfy privacy + compliance constraints are scarce.
