In the second week of January 2026, DuskEVM mainnet officially launched, marking not just a technical milestone but a critical upgrade in privacy financial infrastructure.

Since its founding in 2018, Dusk has taken an unconventional path — avoiding the hype of the retail market and instead focusing on the urgent needs of institutional-grade applications. This Layer 1 blockchain ingeniously combines zero-knowledge proofs and homomorphic encryption, achieving a seemingly contradictory feat: transaction privacy and audit transparency coexist.

EVM compatibility is the core selling point of this release. Developers' code requires minimal changes, with Solidity contracts deployed directly on-chain, significantly reducing migration costs. But the real idea goes beyond that — through the Hedger protocol, privacy capabilities are pushed from the underlying architecture directly to the application layer. Transaction data is inherently encrypted, and only authorized parties can decrypt and verify. This design opens a new window for institutions: on one hand, protecting commercial secrets from leaks; on the other, meeting compliance and audit requirements.

On-chain real-world assets have always been a hot potato, but the emergence of DuskEVM offers a new approach. The planned DuskTrade platform, set to launch in 2026, is a practical application — in partnership with NPEX, a Dutch exchange holding multiple EU licenses, tokenizing over €300 million worth of traditional securities and bringing them on-chain. Complete trading, settlement, and custody processes are all on-chain, allowing investors to trade bonds and stocks without worrying about their holdings being broadcasted.

This approach has significant implications for the European RWA market. The biggest concern for institutions is that privacy will be lost once assets are on-chain. DuskEVM directly leverages privacy and compliance as key selling points, in a way clearing a path for institutional asset tokenization.

At the ecosystem level, Dusk has not prioritized retail popularity but focused on solving real institutional pain points — how to protect sensitive information on the blockchain while complying with regulations. As the mainnet stabilizes, more DeFi protocols and RWA projects are expected to accelerate migration. 2026 may truly be the year Dusk's ecosystem kicks into gear.