In 2026, the blockchain industry is showing an increasingly clear trend: privacy is shifting from being a "cherry on top" to a "necessity." The formal implementation of MiCA, the ongoing escalation of FATF regulatory pressure, and traditional financial institutions' zero-tolerance for on-chain data leaks... These external forces are pushing the entire market to seek infrastructure that can both protect privacy and meet audit compliance.

In this highly competitive space, Dusk Network is gradually standing out with its solid technical foundation. After the mainnet officially launched at the end of 2025, a turning point came quickly—in the second week of January 2026, DuskEVM went live on the mainnet. What does this mean for developers? Writing code in Solidity, native privacy based on zero-knowledge proofs (PLONK), compatibility with Ethereum toolchains... almost a one-step process. Not only does it reuse the entire ecosystem's development experience, but it also provides direct access to Dusk's transaction privacy and final settlement capabilities, significantly reducing the on-chain onboarding difficulty for traditional financial institutions and compliant DeFi projects.

What’s more exciting is the Hedger combination—zero-knowledge proofs paired with homomorphic encryption, making sensitive information such as transaction amounts, counterparties, and asset types completely invisible to outsiders, while providing verifiable audit proofs to regulators. This balanced design of "protecting user privacy while maintaining transparency for regulators" is exactly the answer that banks, securities firms, asset management institutions, and family offices have been seeking.