Since its establishment in 2018, Dusk has been following a unique approach—how to make Layer 1 blockchains meet traditional financial compliance requirements without sacrificing the privacy features inherent to blockchain technology. This modular architecture has built-in privacy and auditability at the core, which sounds simple but actually involves balancing two opposing forces.

Fast forward to the beginning of 2026, the DuskEVM mainnet launched on schedule in the second week of January. This is not a minor update; it signifies a new phase for the entire ecosystem—the application layer compatible with EVM is now officially available, significantly lowering the entry barrier for developers and institutions.

What are the highlights here? Developers can directly use Solidity and the Ethereum toolchain to deploy smart contracts on Dusk's Layer 1 for settlement. No need to learn new languages or rewrite code—Dusk’s native privacy and compliance capabilities are accessible out of the box. The entire ecosystem uses $DUSK as the sole native token to handle network security, governance, and fee settlement, maintaining strong logical consistency.

But what’s truly exciting is the deep integration of the Hedger privacy module. It leverages zero-knowledge proofs and homomorphic encryption to enable truly compliant private transactions within the EVM environment. Users’ balances and transaction amounts are fully encrypted and invisible to outsiders, but when regulators need to audit, users can selectively disclose information. This directly addresses the challenge faced by traditional privacy coins—many projects are targeted by regulators because they lack auditability. From the very beginning, Dusk incorporated "privacy with auditability" into its design principles.