Have you ever wondered how subsequent public chains can survive in the face of giants like Ethereum and Solana?

Many projects answer with performance and ecosystem scale. But Dusk Foundation has taken a different path — it doesn't aim for direct confrontation but instead dives into areas that these major chains, due to their positioning and historical baggage, can't easily address: compliance, privacy, and finance.

This approach is actually quite clever. Ethereum's ecosystem is too complex, making deep protocol-level integration of compliance interfaces very difficult. What about other high-performance chains? They're busy fighting for market share and have little bandwidth to serve heavily regulated financial clients. In this narrow strategic window, Dusk aims to be among the first to thoroughly adapt to regulatory frameworks like EU MiCA. This is its moat — first-mover deep adaptation.

But honestly, this path isn't without significant risks.

The first challenge is very practical: you need to convince two groups simultaneously. On one side, you have to persuade crypto developers that your technology is excellent; on the other, you need to explain to conservative financial institutions what blockchain can actually do. The communication cost? Sky-high.

The second risk is even more painful. Large financial institutions may never adopt dedicated chains; they are more likely to build compliance modules directly on existing general-purpose chains. In that case, Dusk would become just a "technology provider." To avoid this fate, it must rapidly build ecosystem network effects; otherwise, it risks being marginalized.

So, how to assess whether this chain's ecosystem is healthy? You can't just look at the number of DApps. You need to see how deep the commitments from ecosystem partners truly are — are they genuinely migrating core business, or just testing technology for fun? Are there independent teams developing original financial applications on Dusk? These are the real indicators of whether the ecosystem can grow organically.

Ultimately, this is a long-term tug-of-war over the project's prospects and execution capability. Continuous monitoring of its substantive ecosystem progress is essential to see if it can truly open up the niche market of compliant, privacy-focused finance.