Dusk Mainnet EVM version finally makes substantial progress. It was teased on Twitter for several weeks, and real deployment only happened in mid-January, with the official plan to deliver in the second week of January. As an institutional-grade RWA platform, honestly, this approach is quite intriguing—not because of the technology itself, but how far it can go in commercial implementation. Whether NPEX’s partnership is truly substantive or just used as an endorsement remains somewhat unclear.

From a technical perspective, let’s look at the design of DuskEVM. Essentially, it’s about porting the Optimism OP Stack over and doing final settlement on DuskDS. This idea is indeed clever—directly inheriting the Ethereum ecosystem’s toolchain. Developers are already familiar with Hardhat, MetaMask, and other tools, so there’s no need to adapt to a new development paradigm. The official statement is that integration takes only a few weeks, whereas native L1 adaptation could take half a year to a year and cost 50 times more. This comparison is indeed exaggerated and also highlights the network effects of the EVM ecosystem.

But the reality is: there are already many EVM-compatible chains. Polygon, Arbitrum, Optimism, BSC—these chains combined have TVL exceeding hundreds of billions of dollars, with thousands of ecosystem applications. What can Dusk rely on to differentiate itself? Essentially two points—privacy and compliance. The problem is, these selling points have limited appeal to retail users. Most people don’t need privacy transactions, and compliance is more of a concern for institutions.

Therefore, DuskEVM’s positioning from the start is quite unique: it’s not designed for retail users at all, but aimed at institutional clients. This raises a contradiction—if you want to attract institutions, having just a technical solution isn’t enough; you need real application scenarios and liquidity support.