After six years of development, Dusk developers will activate their mainnet today on January 7. The release is a crucial milestone for the Dusk Network, the privacy-focused blockchain seeking to comply with existing regulations.
This Dusk mainnet launch is important because it comes at a time when Dusk seeks to play a key role in real-world asset tokenization and take on competitors, including Ethereum and Solana.
The Dusk Mainnet Rollout
While Dusk launches the Dusk mainnet today, the release has been a multi-phase process that began over two weeks ago on December 20. In a statement, the team then announced the deployment of the Dusk Mainnet onramp contract on Ethereum and the Binance Smart Chain (BSC).
In this way, the team said, supporters would be free to migrate their DUSK tokens on Ethereum and BSC to the mainnet. The goal would be to ensure immediate availability on the mainnet now that the first immutable block goes live.
As part of their roadmap, Dusk developers also allowed early stakes to be on-ramped into the Genesis on December 29. On this day, the team deployed the “Mainnet Cluster.” However, early deposits were not possible until January 3 last week.
Why the Dusk Mainnet Launch Matters
Dusk Network7.43% holders, today’s mainnet launch is a technical milestone that ushers what the Dusk development said is a “new era of financial innovation.”
Their mission is simple: bring traditional finance on-chain while maintaining privacy and complying with existing regulations. With today’s mainnet, it is easy to see why Dusk could redefine how financial players and even ordinary investors interact with capital and explore investment opportunities.
As Emanuele Francioni, the CEO and founder of Dusk Network, put it in an AMA, the layer-1 will “eliminate inefficiencies that continue to plague traditional finance.” Through cryptography, Dusk will record all records and transactions directly on-chain without the wait time common in traditional setups. So far, Dusk has partnered with NPEX, the Dutch exchange, signaling their intent to play a vital role in onboarding traditional players into the blockchain.
Besides lowering costs and complying with existing laws, the team is also innovating. In Q1 2025, Francioni, in an X Spaces, revealed plans to launch Lightspeed, a layer-2 solution compatible with Ethereum that settles on the Dusk Mainnet.
Additionally, the platform is changing the staking game via hyper staking, which will be available from January 7. The stake contract (which can be customized) is ready for deployment. It will allow anyone to stake directly via the network’s Phoenix 2.0 nodes or via a delegate privately.
How DUSK Crypto is Balancing Privacy and Compliance in Mainnet Launch
It will be interesting to see how the privacy-centric protocol evolve in 2025.
Today’s mainnet launch is when regulations across the globe is maturing and particularly tight, especially in Europe.
Fresh laws, including those curbing terrorist financing and money laundering, have become more stringent. Additionally, introducing the Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation (MiCA) demands more transparency in financial transactions.
Because of these stringent measures, especially MiCA, Dusk delayed the mainnet’s originally scheduled launch date in April 2024. By postponing this launch, developers sought to adapt to evolving regulations so that layer-1 wouldn’t compromise on its core value proposition, privacy.
“We created a model that ticks all the boxes for various regulations, providing privacy while addressing the real issues these regulations target, namely anonymity,” Francioni noted.
Ahead of this release, DUSK is steady, looking at Coingecko data. The token is up 50% from December 2024 lows.
