Dusk is open-source allowing regulated assets to be placed on blockchain privately and audibly by issuing tokenized securities with a standard such as XSC. This paves the way to compliant digital securities markets and institutional decentralized finance unsupported by most public blockchains.
Other applications are confidential payments and settlement, privacy enhanced DeFi loans, and selective data disclosure to regulatory reporting. Dusk is an attempt to bring together privacy and compliance and expedited settlement by operating in a more direct manner than general public chains
Dusk is fundamentally based on zero-knowledge proofs and highly sophisticated cryptography to maintain a secret of transaction data and still verify correctness on the blockchain. This allows the users to make their private transactions without compromising on trust, and to only disclose information to authorized party when it is necessary.
The network utilizes a privacy and fast finality-oriented custom Segregated Byzantine Agreement (SBA) consensus protocol. It is modular and divides settlement and execution layers and merges native privacy models with an Ethereum-compatible EVM environment (DuskEVM) to allow developers to create compliant dApps.
Dusk Network is a Layer1 blockchain with privacy deployable to govern regulated financial markets. It allows financial institutions to issue, trade, clear and settle real-world assets, such as securities and bonds, on-chain without infringing on legal requirements, such as MiFID II, MiFIR, MiCA, and GDPR. This implies that financial instruments are able to operate on blockchain without the financial data being made public.
Dusk is not meant for general public chains, but a combination of decentralized finance and regulation compliance, known as RegDeFi. It also provides identity, permissioning and reporting primitives at protocol level allowing institutions to run with privacy and legal supervision.
The $DUSK token is more than just a tradable asset it’s the engine that runs the whole DUSK network.
There’s a fixed total supply of 1 billion tokens, with 500 million initially created and the rest released slowly over time to reward people who help secure the blockchain and keep it running. DUSK is used for staking to participate in consensus, paying transaction fees, and covering gas for smart contracts. It also supports network services like deploying dApps and, eventually, governance where holders can help shape the protocol’s future.
This careful token design helps align incentives, secure the network, and fuel long-term growth in a sustainable way.
DUSK also was not constructed as a retail speculation or hype building around institutions. According to the project, the participants of the significant financial market require anonymity, have to act within the regulations, and will never be able to use transparent records. That is why the architecture of DUSK is modular, the protocol itself is conservative and it took much longer to develop than most projects. It was not a slow development, it was about developing something right that will have a long-lasting financial utilization.
The other fundamental component of DUSK is confidential smart contracts.
These were the first to be introduced before real world assets became a trend in crypto. Even with these contracts, business logic may be executed privately, and the states of the contract are not visible, and results can be checked without any disclosure of data.
This is important since in the normal course of finance real financial contracts are never publicly represented. This is not a feature that Dusk introduced later it was a philosophical decision during the design of the design.
The actual value of DUSK has never been any more ambiguous than that. It was constructed such that real financial assets such as securities, equity-like instruments, bonds and controlled real-world assets could live on-chain without sensitive data being made accessible to the whole world. Unlike the vast majority of blockchains with all public, DUSK ensuring that balances, transaction terms and counterparties remain private, though still allowing them to be verified by a regulator or auditor as needed, with zero-knowledge technology. DUSK is based on this tradeoff between privacy and accountability.
Dusk was never built to chase hype or compete with every new blockchain trend. From the very beginning, its focus has been clear and intentional: building financial infrastructure that protects privacy while still working within regulations. Everything DUSK does connects back to this idea. It’s not about racing other Layer-1s, pushing DeFi farming stories, meme culture, or showing off speed numbers. DUSK exists to support real financial assets, institutions, and a form of privacy that makes sense in regulated, real-world finance.
AI systems are sensitive to data: training data, model states, inference results. Walrus is also created to support large data blobs, which happen to be the natural fit with AI processes that need scale, integrity and reproducibility.
Walrus supports onchain storage and verification of AI models and datasets as well as referencing. This facilitates auditable AI pipelines in which the results may be tracked to precise sources of data. Walrus does not run AI it provides the data base that enables decentralized and trusted AI.
Interpretation of Walrus Matters to RWA and Real Data
Assets in the real world are not just assets that need to be tokenized but need to be stored durably.
Walrus allows storing legal documents, asset metadata, audit trails, and compliance proofs in a verifiable and decentralized manner on a long-term basis. This makes sure that the data of assets are easily accessible and cannot be tampered with in the long run.
Walrus offers the missing layer to credible RWA systems by making real-world data anchored to a decentralized storage. Smart contracts have the ability to prove ownership and history with stored proofs, ensuring the use of centralized databases and enhancing trust throughout the asset lifecycles.
Walrus is a decentralized data availability and a block storage protocol designed to store unstructured and large data, such as media files, datasets, and blockchain history. Walrus does not use single servers, but divides data into fragments and distributes them among independent storage nodes guaranteeing high availability and fault tolerance.
What is special about Walrus core infrastructure is that the storage model of Walrus is programmable. Onchain logic can directly reference stored data and so storage becomes part and parcel of smart contracts. This makes data an internal asset to be verified and long term, as opposed to a dependency.
The Walrus protocol involves a native utility token known as WAL and it is used for staking and paying storage fees. Also, it incentivizes node operations. WAL could become a driver of network participation.
Key Achievement
Walrus also completed a 140 million funding round back by major investors like A16z and Standard Crypto. The Walrus Foundation runs an RFP, Request for Proposals, program that funds ecosystem developers and builders that encourages innovative tools, and integration on top of Walrus
What integrations Walrus has adopted and what role their ecosystem is playing within the market?
Walrus not just stores the data, it enables programmable storage that is integrated with smart contracts. It uses NFTs, AI datasets, gaming, and decentralized apps. Walrus is being monitored and rooted within the broader SUI ecosystem. This makes Walrus an example for innovation across many use cases.
Walrus tokenomics matter because the market cap sits around 5 billion with over 60 percent that is aimed just for the community while the community reserves unlock stretches to 2033
The subsidies drips for years just to keep the nodes paid as the fees grow. The most important thing is their circulating supply is already above 1.25 billion at the start. Their first investor unlock came just after 12 months of the mainnet. This does not only make $WAL feel like a quick trade, but it's like a friendly budget that you have to respect just for now.
Let's see Walrus's performance and cost advantage over other decentralised storage solutions.
So comparing it with other decentralized storage solutions like Filecoin and Arweave, Walrus achieved significantly lower costs. It charges 80% less than Filecoin and 100x less than Arweave. This positions Walrus to the top in its rival market even in traditional centralized cloud storage economics.
When it comes to adopting new technology for the betterment and productivity, Walrus is at the top. The Walrus protocol uses advanced erasure coding called RedStuff to split data into small fragments and then distribute them across different storage nodes. This enhances fault tolerance and also ensures high data availability even if the nodes go offline or even if the nodes delete some data, it can also be rebuilt at any time.
Walrus promoted reliability and transparency at the same time
In the upcoming years, data will become the most expensive asset a person could hold. Data is everything, and Walrus knows what the future is and where it is coming from. So it has fixed itself in this mere gap. @Walrus 🦭/acc is a decentralized storage and data availability protocol built specifically on Sui blockchain network. It is designed to handle large unstructured data, which they call blobs.
It stores videos, images, data sets, and blockchain history securely, efficiently, and at a very lower cost as compared to the traditional storage systems. Here, it win hearts.
Unlike many blockchains, DUSK excellently balances privacy with regulatory compliance. It not only lets the institutions issue and manage financial instruments with built-in KYC AML support, but it also preserves the confidentiality in best possible way.
And in my opinion, this makes #Dusk very unique in bridging traditional markets and decentralized finance altogether, and giving both privacy and audit capabilities.