Alizeh Ali Angel

@Dusk There’s a quiet shift happening in crypto infrastructure: privacy is being pulled out of the “nice-to-have” corner and into the boring world of requirements. Not because people suddenly became idealists, but because tokenized real-world assets and regulated finance keep hitting the same wall—most public chains treat every balance, transfer, and counterparty like public gossip. Europe’s MiCA regime adds heat to that conversation. The EU’s own summary notes that the regulation applies from 30 December 2024, with specific stablecoin titles applying from 30 June 2024, and several national regulators have pointed to transition windows that run into mid-2026.

Dusk Network sits right in that seam. The part developers notice first is that it stopped asking them to learn a whole new universe just to experiment. DuskEVM is described in the official docs as an EVM-equivalent execution environment inside a modular stack, built so Ethereum contracts and tooling can run without custom integrations. That sounds small, but it removes a psychological hurdle that kills a lot of “interesting” chains: if deployment feels unfamiliar, teams quietly drift back to what they know.

The developer path is refreshingly plain. You can deploy Solidity contracts with familiar frameworks like Hardhat or Foundry, point at DuskEVM RPC endpoints, and verify contracts using a Blockscout explorer. Even the network details are laid out like you’d expect—chain IDs, RPC URLs, explorers—rather than hidden behind “contact us” forms. That mundane clarity matters because it turns Dusk from a whitepaper you respect into a chain you can actually try during a workday.

What keeps it from being “yet another EVM place” is the way Dusk separates concerns. In its modular design, DuskDS handles consensus, data availability, and settlement, while execution environments sit above it—DuskEVM for application contracts, and a DuskVM track aimed at deeper privacy-preserving applications. The docs also note that DuskEVM leverages the OP Stack and supports EIP-4844, but settles using DuskDS rather than Ethereum. In plain terms, it borrows familiar EVM plumbing while trying to keep final settlement and privacy features closer to home.

Privacy is where Dusk tries to be specific instead of mystical. A component called Hedger is introduced as a privacy engine “purpose-built for the EVM execution layer,” aiming for confidential transactions that remain auditable when required. Dusk also frames the broader capability as “native confidential smart contracts,” keeping transaction details confidential by default. The Hedger write-up describes mixing zero-knowledge proofs with homomorphic encryption so values can stay encrypted while still being processed, and it calls out regulated auditability and obfuscated order books as a concrete target use case—basically, letting markets work without forcing participants to reveal intent in real time.

The institutional angle is where these ideas get stress-tested. In late 2025, Dusk said it and NPEX—a regulated Dutch exchange—were adopting Chainlink standards including CCIP to bring regulated European securities on-chain, move them across chains, and publish exchange data on-chain. Whether every part of that vision lands quickly is an open question, but the direction is coherent: regulated assets don’t live in isolation, and the moment you talk about trading and settlement, interoperability and data integrity stop being “nice” and start being mandatory.

None of this comes without operational reality checks, and that’s where Dusk’s communications are useful. The project announced its mainnet going live on 7 January 2025. More recently, in January 2026, Dusk published an incident notice describing bridge services being temporarily paused while hardening work continued, while stating the DuskDS mainnet itself wasn’t impacted and kept operating normally. It’s not glamorous, but it’s the kind of detail developers and integrators want to see before they bet months of work on any new stack.

So the trend isn’t just “privacy is back.” It’s that privacy is being redefined as selective disclosure, and developers are refusing to pay a tooling tax to get it. Dusk’s bet—EVM comfort on the surface, confidentiality primitives underneath—fits that moment. The next year will tell us whether this balance stays usable at scale, especially once more teams try to turn compliance from a scary word into a design constraint they can actually code against.

@Dusk #Dusk $DUSK #dusk

@Walrus 🦭/acc Datu drošība ir viena no tām tēmām, kas izklausās garlaicīgi, līdz dienai, kad tā tāda vairs nav. Mirklī, kad kaut kas izzūd, sadalās vai klusi iznīkst, tu apzinies, cik daudz mūsdienu dzīve ir atkarīga no uzglabāšanas, kas uzvedas kā solījums. Tāpēc decentralizēta uzglabāšana pašlaik iegūst jaunu uzmanību. Lietojumprogrammas vēlas auditu un kopīgu kontroli pār blokķēdēm, bet tām arī ir jāspēj apstrādāt lielus failus—multimediju, datu kopas un modeļu artefaktus—bez nepieciešamības maksāt par visu visur replikāciju vai tieši iekļaut neapstrādātus baitus ķēdē.

@Dusk When people bring up on-chain finance, they usually lead with speed—settlement that happens faster, fewer middlemen, and records that are easier to track. But lately, the more important question has been visibility. Traditional markets run on selective disclosure. Traders don’t publish positions, companies don’t reveal cap tables in real time, and regulators get what they need through controlled channels. Public blockchains flip that default, turning every movement of value into a public artifact. For some communities that openness is the point. For regulated finance, it can be a deal-breaker, because “transparency” quickly becomes strategic leakage, and sometimes an accidental broadcast of information that simply shouldn’t be public.

That tension is why privacy-preserving compliance has stopped sounding like a niche preference and started sounding like infrastructure. Tokenization is no longer an abstract pilot done in a lab. DTCC, for example, has said it plans to enable a subset of DTC-custodied U.S. Treasury securities to be minted on the Canton Network, with an MVP targeted for the first half of 2026. And market demand is showing up in the quieter corners too: Chainalysis noted that tokenized money market funds holding U.S. Treasuries rose above $8 billion in assets under management in December 2025. Once real financial products start running on-chain, privacy stops being a ‘nice idea’ and turns into something you have to engineer for from day one.

Regulation is tightening at the same time, which changes the incentive structure for builders. In Europe, ESMA maintains an interim MiCA register and lists a “Last update: 23 January 2026,” a small detail that nonetheless signals how quickly oversight is becoming more centralized and legible. Globally, AML expectations are hardening around the Travel Rule. The FATF update for 2025 says Travel Rule laws are spreading fast—85 jurisdictions have passed legislation, up from 65 last year. Still, a lot of places haven’t fully put it into practice. Translation: more assets are going on-chain, and the companies touching them are getting hit with more rules.

Dusk Network is trying to build for that specific collision. In its own documentation, Dusk frames itself as “the privacy blockchain for regulated finance,” emphasizing markets where confidentiality is the default, but disclosure is still possible when it’s required. That framing matters because it suggests a different baseline: the goal isn’t to hide from oversight, it’s to avoid turning regulated market activity into a public livestream. Dusk also leans into a modular structure—DuskDS for settlement and privacy-enabled transaction models, and DuskEVM for Ethereum-compatible execution—so teams can work with familiar tools while staying anchored to a chain designed for regulated workflows.

A lot of “compliance” talk in crypto stays vague, so I look for concrete mechanics. Dusk’s consensus design is one of those mechanics. Its Succinct Attestation protocol is described as a permissionless, committee-based proof-of-stake model that aims for deterministic finality: blocks are ratified and treated as final, rather than living under the constant threat of reorganizations. In regulated finance, finality isn’t a nice performance tweak; it’s how you keep settlement from turning into a risk-management nightmare.

The other concrete piece is how value moves. Dusk supports two native transaction models that live side by side: Moonlight for public, account-based transfers, and Phoenix for shielded, note-based transfers using zero-knowledge proofs. This “two-lane” approach feels more honest than pretending one privacy posture fits every regulatory scenario. Some flows genuinely need to be public—think simple treasury operations or visible fee payments. Other flows need discretion, not because they’re illicit, but because markets run on confidentiality: balances, counterparties, and trade sizing can be sensitive even when everything is lawful.

Phoenix is where Dusk puts a lot of its privacy-and-auditability story. In Dusk’s own write-up, it highlights Phoenix as a privacy-friendly transaction model with full security proofs, positioning that as real progress rather than hand-waving. The Phoenix repository describes a UTXO-based architecture where value exists as “notes,” and the chain tracks commitments via a Merkle tree—plumbing that supports obfuscated transfers without publishing everyone’s business to the world. If compliance is about being able to prove conditions, not reveal everything, that plumbing matters.

The real test, though, is whether privacy can coexist with the messy reality of regulated markets: cross-chain movement, reliable market data, and issuer control. That’s why Dusk’s collaboration with NPEX and Chainlink is worth paying attention to. Dusk says NPEX is supervised by the Netherlands Authority for the Financial Markets and that the partnership is aimed at bringing listed equities and bonds on-chain, with Chainlink CCIP as the interoperability layer and Chainlink data tooling for exchange-grade data delivery. Press releases always deserve a calm eye, but the direction is clear: regulated assets won’t live on one chain, and “compliance” won’t survive if it breaks the moment assets move.

Even with selective disclosure, the bigger argument isn’t going away overnight. The unanswered bits are governance: who gets access, how quickly firms have to respond to lawful requests, and how to deal with cross-border disagreements. But Dusk’s approach—privacy by default, transparency when needed, deterministic settlement, and a deliberate bridge to regulated issuance workflows—maps neatly onto what the sector is actually struggling with right now. In 2026, the interesting work isn’t proving that finance can run on-chain. It’s proving it can do so without forcing everyone to give up the basic confidentiality that markets have always depended on.

@Dusk #dusk #Dusk $DUSK

@Walrus 🦭/acc If you’ve spent any time building or using dApps, you’ve probably felt the awkward mismatch: the “onchain” part is meant to be durable and permissionless, but the website people actually click is often just a regular bundle sitting on a cloud host. That’s not automatically a problem. It’s just a quiet dependency that becomes very loud when a frontend is taken down, a bucket is misconfigured, or a domain gets pulled at the worst possible time. Walrus Sites is one of the more practical answers I’ve seen to that specific weakness, mostly because it doesn’t try to reinvent everything. It puts the files on Walrus, and keeps the ownership and site metadata on Sui, so the right to update a site looks more like an onchain asset than a login to a hosting dashboard.

To make the title feel real rather than poetic, it helps to be specific about what Walrus is. Walrus is a decentralized storage protocol focused on storing large, unstructured files—images, video, datasets, and the kind of “web stuff” that ends up as static assets—on a network of independent storage nodes, with an emphasis on availability even when some participants behave badly or fail. In Walrus language, those stored chunks are “blobs,” and the system is designed so apps can treat storage less like a best-effort file cabinet and more like a thing with rules and a lifecycle.

That lifecycle piece is where Sui matters. Walrus uses Sui as the coordination and ownership layer: who controls a piece of storage, how long data should persist, and what it means to extend, delete, or transfer it. In practice, Walrus represents stored data and storage-related rights in a way Sui contracts can read and act on, which opens up a bunch of plain, non-magical workflows: a DAO can own a site, a multisig can control updates, a game can programmatically refresh assets, or a marketplace can transfer a storefront as part of a sale. This is the “ownership on Sui” part of the title, and it’s not a marketing flourish—it’s the mechanism that lets a website behave like a governed digital object instead of an admin panel.

Walrus Sites is the visible, browser-facing version of that idea. You build a normal site (the docs lean toward static outputs), publish the resulting files to Walrus, and get back identifiers that can be resolved and served to users through a portal. The documentation points to a public portal run for general access, and it’s clear that “portal” is a general term: anyone can run one, including locally, and known portals can be listed openly. This is an important nuance that tends to get lost. The portal is a point of convenience, not the source of truth. It fetches metadata from Sui and content from Walrus, then serves it over HTTP so a normal browser can load the site without wallets or special tooling.

Then there’s the third clause in the title—“Pay in WAL”—which is where projects like this either become viable or quietly fade. Walrus uses WAL as the payment token for storage. Users pay up front to store data for a fixed time, and that payment is distributed over time to storage nodes and stakers who secure and operate the network. Walrus also describes a design goal that storage costs should remain relatively stable in fiat terms, so you’re not constantly recalculating budgets based on token volatility. I’m cautiously optimistic about that framing, because “stable pricing” is easy to promise and hard to maintain, but at least Walrus is explicit about the intent and the mechanics rather than hand-waving it away.

So why does this feel more relevant now than earlier “decentralized web” waves? Partly because Walrus isn’t speaking from a perpetual testnet future tense anymore. The March 27, 2025 mainnet launch was the moment it stopped being a “someday” project and started being a thing developers could test, break, and build on. Once a system is live, developers start caring about boring details—tooling, reliability, publishing flows, and whether the thing breaks when real users show up. Walrus Sites, as a concrete “here’s a website, it loads” demo of the storage layer, benefits from that shift.

None of this makes frontends automatically safe. A portal can still track traffic or rate-limit requests. A site can still ship insecure JavaScript. And there’s a broader question hiding in the background: how much decentralization does a normal user actually need before it’s worth the trade-offs? But I do think Walrus Sites lands on a sensible middle ground. It doesn’t pretend the web is going to stop using HTTP tomorrow. It just tries to make the most brittle part—the hosted files and the authority to change them—more durable, more transparent, and easier to govern with the same onchain tools people already trust for value. That’s not a revolution. It’s something rarer in this space: a credible improvement.

@Walrus 🦭/acc #walrus $WAL #Walrus