The RWA narrative indeed exploded in 2025, with the market size jumping from 5 billion to 19 billion, and various projects rushing into this track. Dusk Network also saw the opportunity, positioning RWA as a main selling point, promoting that they plan to introduce over €300M in securities assets through NPEX cooperation, and even launching the DuskTrade platform so that ordinary investors can trade compliant stocks, bonds, and fund tokens. It sounds very tempting, but I spent some time carefully digging into Dusk's RWA implementation and found that the gap between ideal and reality is huge; many seemingly promising promises are still just on PowerPoint slides.

Let's focus on the partner NPEX. NPEX is a licensed exchange in the Netherlands, holding several EU financial licenses including MTF (Multilateral Trading Facility), Broker, and ECSP (European Crowdfunding Service Provider). They are also in the queue to apply for a DLT-TSS (Distributed Ledger Technology Trading and Settlement System) license. These licenses are quite valuable, theoretically allowing the legal issuance, trading, and settlement of securities assets on the blockchain.

But here’s a key issue—these licenses are held by NPEX, not Dusk. Dusk at most just provides the underlying technology, similar to how Ethereum provides technical support to a compliant platform. NPEX choosing to issue assets on Dusk is essentially no different from issuing on Ethereum. As a result, Dusk claiming to be the "only privacy L1 with EU regulatory backing" starts to look a bit unsubstantiated.