When it comes to RWA on-chain, most people still hold the old belief—that turning real estate, gold, or bonds into digital tokens is enough. But if you've spoken with major financial institutions, you'll find they are not worried about asset tokenization per se; what truly keeps them awake at night is another issue: privacy.

Imagine a top asset management firm deploying hundreds of millions of dollars on-chain to adjust positions, only to have their trading strategies instantly visible to global competitors because of the fully transparent public blockchain. Who would dare to take such a risk?

This is why Dusk, an older public chain, stands out in this wave of compliance. Since 2018, it hasn't chased after illusory metrics like TPS rankings. Instead, it has focused entirely on solving the hardest problem: how to achieve both privacy and transparency on a public chain.

Its solution is called Citadel—a zero-knowledge identity protocol. The logic is clever: institutions can prove to regulators that they fully comply with KYC and anti-money laundering requirements, while keeping specific transaction amounts and holdings private. You can think of it as installing a "one-way transparent window" for financial regulators—regulators see the risks, but the market cannot see the underlying details. This architecture is truly the infrastructure capable of supporting trillions of dollars in traditional financial transactions.

By 2026, the industry's mindset has completely shifted. In the past, privacy and compliance were seen as opposites; now, everyone understands that compliance without privacy protection is, frankly, a joke.