Privacy is the eternal challenge of encrypted finance. Institutional trading requires concealing position sizes to avoid market impact, DeFi users worry about large transactions being front-run by predators, while regulators demand complete on-chain footprints—this is almost a paradox. Until the emergence of Dusk.

This public chain breaks the deadlock with Hedger privacy engine. In the EVM environment, it achieves truly usable confidential transactions through zero-knowledge proofs and homomorphic encryption. Simply put, transaction data is encrypted by default, and only authorized parties can see the details; others cannot trace. This is not a sleight of hand, but privacy that can stand scrutiny—when needed, authorized parties can generate audit proofs to verify transaction legitimacy without revealing amounts.

Hedger Alpha entered public testing at the end of 2025, and developer feedback has exceeded expectations. The praise of "a truly usable compliant privacy solution" is not unfounded, because it solves two major pain points of previous privacy solutions: first, reliance on Layer 2 zero-knowledge proof schemes that require cross-chain bridges, which are costly and complex; second, privacy and regulation are often seen as opposites.

Hedger is different. Its privacy capabilities are built into Layer 1, eliminating extra costs and complex cross-layer operations. Imagine a dark pool trading scenario: buyers and sellers want to hide order book information to prevent front-running; at the same time, exchanges need to prove to regulators that there is no market manipulation. Hedger makes all this possible.

Even more exciting is the upcoming launch of the DuskEVM mainnet—testnet has been running for some time with stable metrics. What does this mean for developers? Ethereum dApps can be migrated almost seamlessly, without learning new languages or starting from scratch, but with privacy and compliance features automatically inherited. A lending protocol could hide user collateral details but publicly prove the correctness of liquidation logic during liquidation—this is a huge attraction for institutional users.

Performance is also not a bottleneck. DuskEVM supports high throughput, and combined with the DuskDS settlement layer, its processing capacity far exceeds the ceiling of traditional EVM chains. The quick start examples in the official documentation are very friendly; deploying a contract takes only a few minutes, lowering the barrier to participation.

After the mainnet launch, the ecosystem is expected to flourish rapidly. The first wave will likely include compliant DEXs, RWA trading markets, and tools aimed at institutions. These sectors are still in exploration; whoever can provide infrastructure that is both private and compliant first will have the chance to capture institutional capital attention. Growth in TVL will be a natural outcome.