As we enter the second week of 2026, the DuskEVM mainnet has officially gone live. This is a significant milestone—not just a node on Dusk's technical roadmap, but also a sign that institutional-grade blockchains are entering a new track.

Simply put, DuskEVM is doing something that appears straightforward but is technically extremely challenging: full compatibility with EVM. Developers can continue writing Solidity code and deploying standard smart contracts, but settlement occurs on Dusk's native privacy Layer 1. This may sound trivial, but in reality, it eliminates the technical friction that often occurs when migrating from the Ethereum ecosystem to a privacy chain. At the same time, Dusk's core competitive advantage—built-in compliant privacy—is fully preserved.

The real innovation here lies in the Hedger protocol. It combines zero-knowledge proofs and homomorphic encryption to keep transactions fully encrypted during execution. On-chain nodes cannot see the plaintext but can verify that computations are correct; regulators or authorized auditors can selectively disclose necessary information using dedicated keys. This "privacy by default, optional auditing" logic precisely addresses the compliance needs of institutions for KYC/AML and data protection. Compared to other privacy solutions, Hedger's brilliance is that it neither compromises EVM compatibility nor introduces additional trust assumptions.

Just a few days after the mainnet launch, many open-source projects have announced migration plans. Drafts of the DRC20 token standard are also gaining discussion within the community. What does this mean? Privacy lending, confidential derivatives, compliant stablecoins, and similar applications are about to flood the scene, and Dusk provides the environment most needed for these applications. For developers, this is not just a technical platform but also a regulatory-friendly business channel.

The launch of DuskEVM has transformed Dusk's identity—from a "potential project" into a true "deliverer." Against the backdrop of the RWA wave and institutional crypto adoption, Dusk offers the market's most scarce combination: Ethereum compatibility plus native compliant privacy. 2026 has just begun, and the true explosion of the Dusk ecosystem is still ahead.