Dusk’s been quietly getting more interesting lately, especially heading into 2026. Price action has picked up, volume’s been solid, and you can tell there’s renewed attention not just from traders, but from people actually paying attention to what the network is built for. That usually doesn’t happen by accident.

What matters more to me than the price, though, is the tech progress. Dusk’s whole zero-knowledge execution model lets smart contracts run on encrypted data. That means financial logic can stay private, but still be auditable when it needs to be. For regulated finance, that’s huge. You’re not exposing everything on-chain, but you’re also not hiding from oversight.

Another big step is DuskEVM going live. That opens the door for developers to deploy compliant smart contracts with private settlement, which is exactly what tokenized assets and institutional DeFi need if they’re going to work in the real world. This isn’t retail DeFi stuff it’s infrastructure-level thinking.

You can also see the narrative shifting. Some capital is rotating away from older privacy coins into projects that actually fit today’s regulatory environment. #dusk sits right in that middle ground privacy by default, but still compliant.

That’s why I keep seeing @Dusk less as a “privacy project” and more as serious financial infrastructure. $DUSK feels aligned with where regulated on-chain finance is actually going, not just where hype cycles point.