As of January 18, Dusk has 223 million DUSK locked in staking. During the bear market, holders are experiencing depreciation anxiety, but Dusk's PoS mechanism gives ordinary token holders a reason to lock their tokens—earning token-based rewards and contributing to network security. This win-win design, after the mainnet's stable operation, has led to a continued increase in staking rates, which is not surprising.

On the technical level, many L1 projects are still stuck with high entry barriers. Dusk takes a different approach by using EVM compatibility to lower developers' onboarding costs, which is indeed a positive for ecosystem expansion. However, the underlying strategic logic is also worth understanding: the foundation promotes staking activities partly to lock circulating supply and boost prices, but more importantly, to attract institutional participation through ecosystem stability.

Compared to privacy coins like Monero, which follow a purely privacy-focused route without staking mechanisms but enjoy extremely high community trust, Dusk has chosen a more sustainable path with compliant PoS. Whether the ecosystem can take off still depends on the progress of the RWA sector. Risks must also be clearly understood: staking periods are long, and if the token price halves, unlocking could only result in losses; plus, if the pilot project faces delays into Q1, the market expectations will need to be repeatedly adjusted.