Since its founding in 2018, Dusk Foundation has not followed the conventional path of privacy coins. Instead, it has turned its focus to the regulated financial markets worth $17 trillion. Traditional assets such as STOs, debt, repurchase agreements, and private equity have been confined within closed-source ledgers. Now, these paper assets can be fully issued, settled, and traded on the public chain, while maintaining compliance with FATF travel rules and MiCA audits—seemingly contradictory requirements that have been resolved.

The core technology is Dusk's independently developed PlonKup zero-knowledge virtual machine. Its logic is ingenious: all addresses, balances, and transaction amounts on the chain are encrypted, but nodes can verify key propositions without revealing privacy—such as whether a transfer exceeds the issuance limit or if an investor has passed KYC.

What does this mean for asset issuers? No need to store holder lists in Excel; instead, they can write compliance logic into auditable circuit code, deploy it once, and have it automatically executed forever.

The system adopts a modular design, separating the privacy layer, compliance layer, and business layer. Investment banks can flexibly combine these modules like building blocks: requiring US accredited investor verification calls the KYC module; needing 144A resale restrictions activates a time lock; for instant settlement, it connects to a ZK-Rollup settlement bridge.

This is not just theoretical. In Q4 2025, ABN AMRO Clearing, the largest regional clearinghouse in the Netherlands, completed a T+0 atomic settlement of €500 million bonds on the Dusk private testnet, with gas costs as low as $0.0003. This demonstrates that the technology has moved from concept to practice.