Dusk has been pondering a difficult problem since 2018—how to securely put real assets (stocks, bonds, funds, etc.) on the blockchain without exposing institutional privacy, while still passing regulatory scrutiny. This Dutch team from Amsterdam has targeted regulated financial markets, spent six years refining their approach, and finally launched their mainnet on January 7th of this year.

On the technical side, it’s quite interesting. Dusk uses zero-knowledge proofs to implement confidential smart contracts—transaction details are a black box externally, but regulatory agencies can audit if needed. This is a clever compromise between traditional public blockchains, which are fully transparent and prone to privacy leaks, and privacy coins, which are too hardcore for regulators to access.

They designed two transaction modes. Phoenix is fully private, suitable for institutions with high confidentiality requirements; Moonlight adopts an open approach, making it easier for interactions with major exchanges and ordinary users. The consensus mechanism chosen is Segregated Byzantine Agreement, balancing efficiency and privacy.

Currently, the circulating supply is 500 million tokens, with a maximum supply of 1 billion. After the mainnet launch, they immediately advanced the programmable staking (Hyperstaking) feature, supporting privacy staking, liquidity staking, referral rewards, and other customizable logic, aiming to expand the participant base through incentives. The years 2025 to 2026 are expected to be a critical period for ecosystem explosion.