Having navigated the crypto space for years, I have witnessed countless projects born in fervor and fade away during cold winters. From the ICO craze in 2017, to the DeFi explosion in 2021, and now RWA becoming the new favorite, I’ve seen meteoric flashes of brilliance as well as projects truly taking root. Dusk Network belongs to the latter — it’s a very special chain.

It doesn’t rely on marketing hype to go viral, nor does it have overwhelming airdrop plans or celebrity endorsements to boost its profile. This project, built by an Italian team, chose the hardest path — spending six years focusing on the niche of "privacy + compliance," transforming a Layer-1 chain from concept to mainnet launch.

I first encountered this project in 2020. At that time, someone mentioned in a group chat: "A European team is building a privacy chain, aiming to launch the mainnet in 2025." The reaction was collective ridicule — six years? Who would wait that long? The market had already moved on to new stories. I didn’t pay much attention.

But they really did wait until 2025.

On January 7th last year, the genesis block of the mainnet was produced. That day, the news volume was very small, almost drowned out by the noise of various airdrop announcements. I even commented in the chat that it was another "air chain." But over the year, it didn’t collapse, didn’t have serious bugs, and wasn’t hacked open. It has been running steadily until now.

Technical iterations have also continued. In December last year, DuskDS was upgraded — this upgrade directly doubled data availability and chain processing performance. These aren’t marketing numbers; they are real technical improvements. Last month, DuskEVM was fully opened, allowing developers to migrate projects with almost no extra cost, while naturally gaining privacy layer protection — something other public chains can’t do.

When it comes to Dusk’s core competitive advantage, it boils down to two words: **Selective Transparency**.

Most public chains are like transparent glass houses — every transaction exposed to the sunlight. Institutions dislike this, which led to chains like Dusk that focus on privacy. But pure privacy also has issues — it’s too black-box, making regulation impossible to trace, creating compliance dilemmas.

Dusk’s solution is: users can choose the visibility of their transactions. Want privacy? Privacy. Need transparency? Transparency. Both worlds can coexist. For enterprise-level applications, this means protecting sensitive business information while also passing KYC audits. It’s a very clever design.

From a joke in 2020 to real-world deployment in 2025, this project has answered all doubts with facts. Not all persistence yields results, but Dusk’s results are truly worth watching.