Starting in 2026, one public chain's move is particularly worth noting. Dusk Foundation's mainnet launched on January 7th, which on the surface is a milestone event, but the underlying logic is even more interesting.

During a six-year development cycle, they abandoned the pursuit of the mainstream Layer-1 wave. Instead, they turned to a seemingly niche track: regulated real-world assets. This decision alone indicates that something significant is at play.

DuskEVM allows developers to build privacy smart contracts using the familiar Solidity language. It sounds technically deep, but what is the practical significance? Institutions have been waiting for this—how to issue bonds, private equity, or real estate tokens on-chain while keeping commercial terms from being fully transparent. The complex contractual designs in traditional finance become problematic on blockchain, and Dusk addresses this key issue.

It does not follow the Monero-style fully anonymous route but instead adopts an "auditable privacy" design. Transaction data is hidden by default, but regulatory agencies or auditors can view specific information through selective disclosure keys. Under the MiCA framework, this is especially practical—EU regulators fear opaque operations, and Dusk has made this solution an optional protocol layer toggle rather than a remedial measure after the fact.

The progress of the NPEX partnership provides more concrete imagination. After the mainnet launch, they plan to gradually move European securities onto the chain, aiming to tokenize assets exceeding €300 million. This is not just conceptual hype. In reality, it involves transferring traditional exchange issuance and settlement logic onto the blockchain: real-time clearing, eliminating multiple layers of custody, and allowing users to directly manage assets. Liquidity fragmentation and reliance on intermediaries have always been major obstacles to the real-world asset (RWA) implementation. Dusk attempts to break these bottlenecks through a privacy consensus mechanism (Blind Bid PoS) and cross-chain interoperability solutions (integrating Chainlink CCIP).

Of course, the reality is that the mainnet has only been live for two weeks, and the ecosystem applications are still in their infancy. Node distribution and the actual locked asset scale need time to verify. But if 2026 truly becomes the year of asset tokenization, this focus on regulatory-friendly privacy positioning might be more attractive to institutions than public chains that do everything. It does not aim to replace Ethereum but to create a parallel track tailored for specific scenarios. Progress may seem slow, but once institutional funds start flowing in, network effects will be highly sticky.