At the beginning of 2026, Dusk Network announced two major news: the DuskEVM mainnet is scheduled to go live in the second week of January, and DuskTrade will also be launched within this year. These developments mark Dusk's transition from a privacy infrastructure provider to a new stage of service-oriented applications at the institutional level.

DuskEVM targets the Ethereum ecosystem. Simply put, it is a fully EVM-compatible application layer—developers can deploy standard Solidity contracts directly without learning a new language, with near-zero migration costs. But there is a key difference: the underlying layer of DuskEVM is driven by Dusk's own privacy consensus layer. With the support of the Hedger protocol, transactions within the EVM environment can achieve zero-knowledge privacy protection while retaining an auditable interface. What does this mean? Institutions can build compliant DeFi applications, RWA markets, or private fund tokenization platforms using familiar development toolchains, without worrying about transaction data leaks or falling into regulatory gray areas.

DuskTrade is a real-world example of this privacy capability. Dusk has established a deep partnership with NPEX, a licensed Dutch exchange—an EU-regulated multilateral trading facility (MTF) and crypto asset service provider (ECSP). According to the cooperation framework, DuskTrade will provide on-chain trading and settlement services for tokenized securities exceeding €300 million in scale. Users complete the entire process of subscription, trading, and dividend distribution on-chain, with full KYC compliance checks, but transaction details remain private from unauthorized parties. This "on-chain compliant exchange" operation model is effectively disrupting the cost structure of traditional securities trading.