Dusk Foundation once represented the clearest voice in Web3. While the entire community was still shouting "Code is Law," it saw through: the real financial world requires rules, responsibility, and more importantly, accountability.

Thus, this ambitious plan was born—using five years to encode the full set of MiCA regulations into XSC contracts. By implementing zero-knowledge proofs to achieve a "just visible" state, core operations of traditional finance such as securities issuance, share transfers, and dividend distributions can run directly on the public chain.

The numbers look promising. By the end of 2024, the NPEX mainnet will officially launch; in 2025, it will pass the Dutch AFM sandbox certification; by early 2026, the staking addresses will have exceeded 3,500. Everything seems to be progressing as planned.

But the deeper you look, the more obvious the problems become. Dusk's decline is not a technical issue—the technology itself is sound. The real crux lies deeper: its entire premise has been ruthlessly pierced by reality.

Dusk bets that the world needs a "decentralized yet compliant" financial infrastructure. But what is the actual situation? Nobody really needs it.

Traditional financial institutions don't care about "decentralization." They already have a perfect operational toolchain: Euroclear alone handles over 90% of securities clearing in Europe, and T+1 settlement is standard. Platforms like Securitize and Tokeny are even better—they provide end-to-end solutions, handling assets worth over a hundred billion dollars annually.

Although these solutions are centralized, their advantages far outweigh others: they are user-friendly, fast, and reputable. Dusk wants them to abandon this mature system and migrate to a new platform that, while compliant, still requires integration, training, and auditing? The benefits far do not justify the risks and costs of migration. Moreover, why would they take this risk?