The RWA track in 2026 has long been crowded. While projects seem to be booming, most are still just storytelling and small-scale testing, with very few truly landing. Dusk Network is an exception—it hasn't rushed to shout slogans but has been quietly laying the groundwork, building the underlying infrastructure for institutional-grade on-chain finance from the perspectives of privacy, compliance, and performance.

Starting technical development as early as 2018, Dusk has spent years refining these three areas. The latest major development is the upcoming launch of DuskEVM, which is powerful because: developers familiar with Solidity can integrate with almost zero migration cost, and it natively integrates hardcore privacy technologies like zero-knowledge proofs and homomorphic encryption. In other words, transaction validation and privacy protection can be achieved simultaneously, which is no small feat technically.

What’s even more interesting is the behind-the-scenes collaboration. The Dutch licensed securities exchange NPEX isn’t just doing virtual testing; it plans to genuinely migrate hundreds of millions of euros worth of securities for small and medium-sized enterprises onto the chain. These securities will go through the full lifecycle on Dusk Chain—issuance, trading, and automatic dividends—while fully complying with Europe’s DLT pilot regulatory framework. This is not just a proof of concept; it marks Europe’s traditional finance sector officially stepping into the era of programmable securities on the blockchain.

To support this system, Dusk has equipped a complete toolchain. The XSC token standard is specifically tailored for regulated securities. The Citadel identity and permission management system embeds legal requirements directly into the protocol. There’s also the Succinct Attestation mechanism, which can reduce transaction finality to seconds—crucial for institutional clients, as settlement efficiency directly impacts risk tolerance.

Ultimately, Dusk isn’t just building a privacy chain. It’s creating a comprehensive privacy RWA solution that institutions are willing to use, regulators can recognize, and developers can quickly adopt. While the market is still debating whether “privacy chains are useful,” Dusk is already moving real euro assets onto the chain.

For those optimistic about the trillion-dollar RWA track, a truly demand-driven, asset-backed, fully supported infrastructure might be the most overlooked opportunity right now. Once DuskEVM officially launches and NPEX’s first securities go live, the institutional story of this chain will become much clearer. The outcome of RWA ultimately depends on who can bring real assets onto the chain first—by this measure, Dusk seems to already be ahead.