Less than a week into 2026, the Dusk Foundation has proven one thing through concrete actions — privacy protection and regulatory compliance are not mutually exclusive; instead, they should be standard features of future financial infrastructure.

The most noteworthy news this week is **the official launch of DuskEVM mainnet**. This means developers can finally write smart contracts in Solidity on a native Layer 1 that supports privacy. Sounds a bit exciting, right? Because this addresses a longstanding challenge — over the past few years, many institutions and traditional financial entities have had the biggest concern about on-chain finance: putting data on the chain equals privacy leaks; if you want privacy, you can't pass regulatory scrutiny.

Dusk’s solution is summarized in four words: achieving both fish and bear’s paw.

The core technology is supported by the newly launched **Hedger Alpha** in public testing. This tool integrates the latest in homomorphic encryption and zero-knowledge proofs, allowing transactions on the EVM to ensure confidentiality while providing a complete audit trail — users cannot see each other's balances and transfer records, but regulators can intervene when necessary, enabling full traceability and data verification without blind spots. Use cases like RWA applications, compliant DeFi, security tokens, and institutional-level privacy payments? Perfectly tailored.

What truly inspires confidence is that Dusk is not just talk. The project is collaborating with licensed traditional financial institutions in the Netherlands to move this system from the lab into the trading market.