In the past month,$DUSK starting from around $0.05, it surged to a high of $0.30 and then fell back to the range of $0.105-$0.11, with a maximum increase of over 90% in 7 days. However, it also experienced several pullbacks following the market's sharp declines, and its market cap currently hovers between $51 million and $54 million. Overall, this wave of the market has a genuine delivery-driven aspect, but it also exposes Dusk's characteristic of being 'slow to heat up'.
The white paper has repeatedly emphasized a core point since 2018: a fully transparent public chain cannot support real-world assets, as companies cannot expose their entire supply chain, costs, and trading partners on a public ledger. Dusk's proposed solution is 'auditable privacy'—the Phoenix protocol defaults to hiding details with ZK and allows for selective disclosure at the click of a button when needed. This theory seemed somewhat 'redundant' at the time, but eight years later, in 2026, it suddenly became a necessity. After the implementation of MiCA, anonymous coins were delisted, and fully transparent chains were avoided by institutions, making Dusk's white paper appear like a script written in advance.
The data from the mainnet over the past three weeks is also presentable: NPEX has accumulated over 270,000 simulated trades with 300 million euros in RWA testing, a privacy leak rate of 0, Hedger V2 has significantly reduced ZK proof costs, and the staking ratio is over 37%, with an annualized return of over 36%. These are solid advancements.
But to put it bluntly: after eight years of grinding, what emerged is a product that is 'not bad,' rather than a revolutionary ace in the hole. The institutional-level applications that were hyped in the white paper are currently mostly still in the testing network and simulated trading phase. The actual progress of NPEX's real asset launch remains slow, and the actual capital inflow from institutions has yet to meet expectations. The 90% price increase this time is more about the market's early pricing of the 'compliant privacy' narrative, rather than a value discovery driven by real business explosion.
Currently, Dusk's biggest advantage is still its clear positioning: in an era of tightening regulation, it is indeed one of the few solutions that can satisfy both privacy and compliance. However, the disadvantages are also quite obvious—slow execution speed, delayed ecosystem deployment, and almost zero marketing. If NPEX cannot truly launch a large number of real assets in Q1, the predictions in the white paper can only continue to lie on paper.
Dusk has proved this month that it is not a dead project, but it still has a considerable distance to go to 'fulfill all the promises of the white paper.' At the current price of around 0.105 dollars, it is neither particularly cheap nor at a level that would encourage people to invest heavily with closed eyes. The real test has only just begun.@Dusk $DUSK #dusk
