Having held DUSK for many years, I have been observing what kind of projects can truly traverse bull and bear markets. The conclusion is clear—it's not about short-term hot spots, but about solid technology and real-world applications.

Honestly, most public chains in the crypto space are currently competing over TPS and storytelling, but DUSK’s approach over the past few years has been completely opposite—seemingly steady, but every step hits a pain point. This project, which has been deeply involved in privacy and compliance for eight years, is about to reach a critical moment: the DuskEVM mainnet will launch in January 2026.

From a technical perspective, this is not just a simple version update. The team replaced the previous engine with Piecrust VM, increasing zero-knowledge proof performance tenfold, and reducing finality to 2-3 seconds. What does this mean? Privacy transactions finally have practical execution efficiency.

Even more interesting is the architecture design—the dual VM scheme supports high-performance ZK application development while being compatible with the Solidity ecosystem. Developers don’t need to relearn a language; they can deploy dApps directly, significantly lowering the ecosystem entry barrier.

The combination of the Hedger privacy module and the Citadel framework truly turns zero-knowledge proofs from theory into usable transaction infrastructure. This is what institutional-grade financial infrastructure should look like. From technical implementation to ecosystem expansion, the value of this project is gradually being realized.