Shehab Goma

Dusk may have solved one of the biggest problems facing specialized L1s: getting developers to care.

DuskEVM is now live on testnet.

At first glance, “EVM compatibility” sounds like another blockchain feature.

I think the bigger story is what Dusk is doing with it.

Developers can use familiar Solidity and EVM tooling, while Dusk keeps its focus on something most general-purpose chains aren't specifically designed around:

regulated financial markets.

That creates an interesting combination.

On one side, you have the existing EVM developer ecosystem.

On the other, you have Dusk's infrastructure for privacy, compliance, deterministic settlement and regulated assets.

And DuskEVM sits between them.

The important part is that this isn't just about attracting more smart contracts.

If developers can build tokenized assets, trading applications and financial infrastructure using familiar tools — while accessing Dusk's privacy and settlement capabilities — the addressable builder market becomes much larger.

But here's the part I'm watching closely:

Testnet activity is not adoption.

The real milestone won't be how many contracts get deployed.

It will be whether developers turn those contracts into applications that attract real users, real assets and real financial activity.

If that happens, DuskEVM could become more than an EVM layer.

It could become the developer gateway into Dusk's regulated-finance ecosystem.

Do you think EVM compatibility can be the catalyst that finally brings serious builders into Dusk?
@Dusk #dusk $DUSK

One thing about Dusk caught my attention today:

The next growth phase may depend less on what Dusk builds itself — and more on what the community is able to build around it.

That’s why I’m watching OpenDusk closely.

Imagine a simple example:

If a community treasury eventually has enough resources to fund 10 serious teams — developers, tooling, research, financial applications, infrastructure — the value isn’t just the money being distributed.

It’s the number of new reasons people have to use Dusk.

More builders → more applications → more activity → more demand for the underlying network.

And that creates something I think is more important than another short-term narrative:

an ecosystem that can compound from within.

But there’s a real tension here.

A treasury alone doesn’t create growth.

Capital can be wasted.
Governance can become slow.
Funding can go to projects that look impressive but generate no users.

So for me, the real OpenDusk test isn’t:

“Did the community approve a treasury?”

It’s:

Can community-controlled capital turn into applications people actually use?

If Dusk gets that part right, could decentralized ecosystem funding become one of its biggest growth catalysts?
@Dusk #dusk
$DUSK
$TAC
$MAGMA

I used to check rates three or four times a day.Not because I wanted to. Because I had to.

One spike and the loop I carefully built would start bleeding. I would sit there calculating whether to unwind early or gamble that the rate would come back down. It never felt like investing. It felt like babysitting a position that could turn on me at any moment. That constant low-level anxiety is what most of DeFi still runs on. @TermMax is the first protocol that made me stop doing it.

You pick the rate and the term at the start. Then you close the tab. The number you locked is the number you get. No mid-term surprises. No sudden jumps that force you to react.What I find more interesting than the marketing is how this changes behavior. When the cost of capital is known in advance, people size positions differently.

They stay longer. They stop treating every market as a short-term farm that has to be monitored like a restless child. The protocol didn’t just add fixed rates on top of the old system. It rebuilt the credit position itself so both sides become clear and tradable from day one. That single design choice is why capital can sit with more confidence instead of constantly looking for the exit.We’re four days from the TMX TGE.

I’m curious how many people will still keep refreshing rates out of habit… and how many will finally start treating on-chain credit like something they can actually plan around.What would change in your own size and holding period if you never had to worry about the rate moving against you again?
#TermMax
$BLESS
$BTW
$APR

What bothers you more in DeFi lending?

For a long time I treated tokenization like the destination.

Get the asset onchain and the hard work was done. I was wrong.The real bottleneck is everything that comes after. Ownership records, eligibility checks, transfer restrictions, matching payment with delivery, then the ongoing work of dividends, voting and corporate actions. Most tokenized assets still leave all of that scattered across separate systems that constantly need reconciling.

@Dusk approaches it differently. The goal is not just to represent the asset — it is to run the full ownership lifecycle on one shared record. Issuance, eligibility, settlement and servicing stay connected. Sensitive information stays controlled. The handoffs that create cost and delay simply disappear.

This is the quiet difference between a digital wrapper and real market infrastructure.When the entire path from issuance to servicing no longer needs five different ledgers talking to each other, what percentage of private and regulated markets do you think finally becomes practical to move onchain?
#dusk
$DUSK
$AVAAI
$BLESS
Biggest challenge for regulated assets onchain?

TermMax isn’t really solving a lending problem. It’s solving a rate-certainty problem.

I went through the March 2026 TMX whitepaper and one detail stood out: TermMax is building around fixed-rate fixed-term DeFi, rather than accepting variable rates as the default.

FT = fixed-rate exposure.
Lenders buy FT below face value and redeem it at maturity locking in the yield when they enter.

XT = the other side of the debt.
Borrowers receive XT and can sell it for liquidity, locking their borrowing economics.

Then there’s GT an NFT that packages collateral and debt into a leveraged position. Instead of manually looping borrow → collateral → borrow the position can be created through a single transaction.

@TermMax uses a custom Range Order AMM where curators work with target APR ranges rather than conventional price ranges.

The whitepaper says unused funds can be deployed into floating-rate protocols such as Aave, Morpho and Venus while waiting for fixed-rate demand.

That creates an interesting trade-off
Fixed-rate markets need liquidity.
But liquidity providers also need capital efficiency.

TermMax is attempting to address both through atomic orders + idle-fund deployment.

The tokenomics deserve a closer look too.

1B TMX maximum supply
200M initial circulation
29% ecosystem allocation
28% investors
15% team
15% community

The ecosystem allocation vests over 48 months, while team and investor allocations have 12-month cliffs followed by vesting.

TMX itself is designed around governance and staking, with treasury revenues potentially coming from trading, borrowing and liquidation fees.
The bigger question isn’t whether fixed rates sound useful.

It’s whether #TermMax can generate enough real fixed-rate demand to make this market structure economically meaningful.

The whitepaper reports $64M+ TVL 837K+ registered wallets and 170K+ peak daily active users.

Can that activity translate into durable demand for fixed-rate borrowing and structured products?
$ONG

Phoenix vs Moonlight: Why Dusk Needed Two Transaction Models

I think the most misunderstood part of @Dusk is not its privacy layer.

It is why Dusk built a transparent transaction model beside Phoenix in the first place.

The answer is simple: financial markets do not operate with one privacy requirement.

The 2024 Dusk whitepaper describes Moonlight as the public transaction layer added alongside Phoenix. Moonlight uses an account-based model, where addresses and balances are visible. Phoenix takes the opposite route: shielded, note-based transactions using zero-knowledge proofs.

With Moonlight, an exchange can scan accounts, reconcile balances and process deposits using a familiar public ledger model. Dusk's current integration documentation actually recommends Moonlight for exchange deposits and withdrawals because Phoenix requires a different custody and scanning architecture.

Its notes are encrypted, while ZK proofs let the network verify things like validity and double-spend protection without revealing the transaction amount or the specific notes being spent. Dusk also designed selective disclosure so privacy doesn't automatically mean “no accountability.”

So the original design choice was not:

Phoenix vs Moonlight.

It was:

privacy when needed + transparency when required.

And there is an important 2026 update here.

Dusk's AEGIS hard fork addressed 39 findings, including 7 critical issues, with one critical root cause involving Phoenix fee/refund binding.

More importantly, the latest network documentation says the Boreas upgrade retires Phoenix transactions on the network, while canonical transaction handling has moved forward.

Phoenix was not simply a privacy feature. It was an experiment in making confidential settlement work alongside a public financial rail.

They are different settlement requirements.

Dusk's evolution is interesting precisely because the protocol is now refining which parts of that original dual-model architecture still belong in the production stack.
#dusk
$DUSK

I remember staring at Dusk's documentation, trying to understand what made it different.

Everyone talks about tokenization. Settlement speed. Compliance. But @Dusk is testing something else entirely: regulator-readable privacy.

Traditional blockchains give you a binary choice. Everything public. Or everything hidden. Neither works for regulated finance.

Dusk's solution is selective disclosure. Transactions stay private by default. But regulators can verify compliance when needed—revealing only what's required, nothing more.

Zero-knowledge proofs let you prove a transaction is valid without exposing who, how much, or to whom. Privacy designed for trust, not opacity.

The traction is already visible. Sozu holds $26M in staked assets. NPEX is bringing €300M in tokenized securities through #dusk . And 21X, the first EU DLT-TSS license holder, has integrated Dusk as an active partner.

Here's what I keep coming back to: If the technology for private, compliant finance has existed for years, why has it taken this long to get here?

Maybe because we focused on building faster chains instead of building chains regulators can trust. Dusk didn't just launch another L1. They built one where privacy and compliance aren't trade-offs—they're features.

What's holding your industry back—technology, or trust?
$DUSK

I learned this the hard way.

Last year, I jumped into a variable pool at 18% APY. Three weeks later? 4%. No warning. Just less.

That's not planning. That's guessing with a percentage sign on it.

What I actually needed was simple: to know what I'd earn next month, not chase what I might earn today.

That's where @TermMax clicked for me.

One live example hit home:

Aave recently posted a 24-hour borrowing cost spike of over 40% in certain markets. Imagine trying to run a treasury on that. You can't.

#TermMax launched on HyperEVM just 2 days ago — its 9th chain. Users can borrow USDC against HyperUSD with the rate locked at entry. That's the difference: the terms are known from the start.

The broader takeaway is even more interesting.

TermPrime — its institutional fixed-rate venue — went live on Canton Network. That's not just DeFi natives experimenting. That's infrastructure for participants who care about term, cost, and predictability.

This may be the bigger shift: DeFi becoming something users can actually structure around, not just speculate inside.

So the question is If fixed rates existed for every asset tomorrow — would you still chase variable yields?

I used to think tokenization was the answer. Put every real-world asset onchain, and suddenly everything becomes liquid and accessible.

Then I looked at the numbers.

For every dollar of tokenized value you can actually trade, there's roughly $10 that just sits there as a digital receipt. According to RWA.xyz data, over 900 out of 1,300 assets went an entire week without a single trade. That's $33 billion sitting frozen.

Tokenization didn't solve liquidity. It just created digital wrappers around illiquid assets.

The real problem was never putting assets onchain. It was making them actually tradeable—with legal finality, compliance built in, and settlement that counts.

@Dusk takes a different approach. Through NPEX, a Dutch AFM-regulated exchange, they're bringing over €300 million in tokenized securities onchain. Real equities and bonds, settling in seconds rather than days. Through 21X, trading and settlement are merged into a single atomic action—recognized by EU law.

Quantoz provides the settlement asset: EURQ, a MiCA-compliant digital euro. Regulated fiat, onchain.

The infrastructure is there. And the activity suggests it's resonating—Sozu, Dusk's liquid staking protocol, already holds over $26 million in staked assets. That's real participation, not speculation.

so If tokenization was supposed to unlock liquidity, why are most tokenized assets barely trading?

Maybe because we focused on wrapping assets instead of rebuilding settlement infrastructure. #dusk is building something regulators can actually work with.

What's the one thing holding your industry back from moving onchain?
$DUSK

I used to think tokenization's biggest hurdle was speed. Faster blocks. Lower latency. More TPS. But I had it backwards.

The real bottleneck was never about how fast you can settle. It was about whether settlement counts.

Try explaining to a regulator that a €50 million bond trade settled in two seconds—but there's no legally recognized finality, no auditable trail, no compliance framework. They don't care about your block time. They care about enforceable settlement.

That's the tension @Dusk is actually addressing.

NPEX, a Dutch AFM-regulated exchange, is bringing over €300 million in tokenized securities onchain through Dusk. Real equities and bonds, settling in seconds, not days. 21X—the first company to receive the EU's DLT-TSS license—legally merges trading and settlement into a single atomic action. No clearing house intermediaries. Just finality at the protocol level, recognized by EU law.

Quantoz provides the settlement asset: EURQ, a MiCA-compliant digital euro. Regulated fiat, onchain.

Add Cordial Systems, with over $20 billion in on-chain private credit custody, and Chainlink bridging 65+ chains.

Sozu, Dusk's liquid staking protocol, already holds over $26 million in staked assets. Real participation, not speculation.

Here's the uncomfortable question: If the technology was never the problem, why did it take this long?

Maybe because we optimized for speed when we should have optimized for trust. Dusk and its EU-licensed partners built something regulators can actually say yes to.

What's the one thing holding your industry back from moving onchain—and is it really technology, or something deeper?
#dusk
$DUSK
Biggest barrier to institutional blockchain adoption?

The more I look at @Dusk the less “privacy chain” feels like the right frame.

What actually clicked is simpler.

Institutions never wanted anonymity.
They wanted to move real assets without every position and payment turning into public strategy — and without making compliance impossible.

Transparent chains leak. A routine interest payment can reveal fund size.
Pure privacy chains get blocked because counterparties and regulators can’t verify what they need.

One broadcasts commercial data.
The other fails the compliance desk.

The only setup that works keeps data private by default while still letting the right parties confirm eligibility when required.

That’s not privacy.
That’s permission.

#dusk sits on the permission side of that line.

And the longer this market runs, the more obvious it becomes: permission is the real product.
$DUSK

I used to think "institutional DeFi" was an oxymoron.

We had the throughput, the smart contracts, and the privacy tools for years. But speed wasn't the real bottleneck. Legal finality was. How do you settle a €50M bond in seconds while ensuring a regulator can still audit the counterparty? For a long time, the answer was simply: you don't.

Dusk's approach addresses this. They built a compliance-aware L1 where zero-knowledge proofs offer verifiable disclosure, not anonymity. Regulators get visibility; counterparties get confidentiality. Infrastructure is necessary, but the real signal is in the licensed partners plugging into it.

NPEX, a Dutch AFM-regulated exchange, has facilitated over €200 million in financing for SMEs. They are migrating their listed equities and bonds onto Dusk—representing €300 million in regulated assets moving to settlement rails that finalize in seconds, not days. Then there's 21X, the first entity to receive the EU's DLT-TSS license, which legally merges trading and settlement into a single atomic on-chain action. No clearing house intermediaries. Just finality at the protocol level, recognized by EU law.

Quantoz Payments, a MiCA-compliant EMI, provides the settlement asset: EURQ, a fully backed digital euro—regulated and programmable fiat on-chain. Add Cordial Systems, with over $20 billion in on-chain private credit custody, and Chainlink bridging 65+ chains. The foundation is there: regulated fiat in, compliant issuance, atomic execution.

Trust and adoption will be built incrementally. Dusk's Sozu protocol already holds 26.6 million in staked assets—a tangible signal that the network is securing meaningful participation. And with €300 million in motion from NPEX, this looks less like a test and more like the beginning of a structural shift. The question is no longer if capital markets move onchain, but which settlement layer regulators ultimately trust. Dusk and its EU-licensed partners are making that answer increasingly clear.
@Dusk #dusk $DUSK

Noticed the Dusk CreatorPad campaign launched today on Binance Square—running from August 13 to August 26, with 480,000 DUSK on the leaderboard plus up to 40,000 USDC for livestream rewards, and a minimum $10 $DUSK trade to qualify. Standard growth mechanics. What caught me was the contrast between the audience this attracts and what Dusk is actually building.

Most crypto treats privacy as a way to hide. #dusk treats it as selective disclosure under rules. That sounds less radical, but for regulated finance it may be more important. Markets need auditable privacy not black-box transactions.

Dusk's architecture reflects that: Moonlight for public account-based activity, Phoenix for shielded ZK-powered transfers, both on the same chain. Not one-size-fits-all opacity context-dependent confidentiality.

The same logic shows up in settlement. @Dusk is built around deterministic finality once a block is ratified, which matters for securities because failed or ambiguous settlement can create downstream compliance problems.

And the NPEX link makes the ambition concrete: €300M+ in tokenized SME stocks and bonds are associated with that onboarding pipeline through Dusk's ecosystem. Not live on-chain settlement yet but a real signal of the market it wants to serve.

The bigger question is whether privacy eventually gets repriced—not as anonymity for individuals, but as confidentiality for markets.

🚨 MARKET UPDATE: July CPI came in at 3.4%, exactly in line with expectations.

Core CPI eased to 2.5%, also matching forecasts.

📈 Monthly CPI: +0.1%, rebounding from -0.4% in June.
$APR
$PROM
$BR

Was reading through Babylon's staking docs when something clicked.

Over 250 finality providers. ~$4.8B in BTC committed.

Impressive. But one thing kept bothering me.

@BabylonLabs_io may look like decentralized security at the protocol layer while functioning like outsourced conviction at the user layer.

The pitch: Bitcoin-backed security, no bridges, self-custody. True at the code level.

But here's the tension: Bitcoin supplies the trust. The web app shows a curated list of providers — yet data shows most delegators gravitate toward the largest names and rarely adjust. They're not evaluating risk or monitoring behavior. They pick, stake, and forget.

That's not distributed security judgment. That's outsourcing conviction to whoever looks safest.

One detail that reinforces this: when a major coordinator (Lombard) transitioned between providers in April 2025, a single wallet handled ~13,000 BTC in withdrawals. The protocol worked as designed. But if one coordinator can shift 30%+ of TVL, the system looks centralized at the capital layer — even if the security layer is structurally decentralized.

So what's actually being decentralized?

The capital — or the conviction to make good decisions with it? Because those feel like different answers.
#baby
$BABY

Been staring at Babylon's staking dashboard for the last hour.

~$4.8B TVL. Kraken integration. Real Bitcoin locked as collateral.

Impressive numbers. But something felt off.

Babylon may have proven demand for Bitcoin utility faster than it has changed the deeply conditioned habits of Bitcoin holders.

Bitcoiners will lock their BTC. They're doing it right now. But will they behave differently?

@BabylonLabs_io made BTC productive — but it didn't make Bitcoin holders comfortable acting like PoS users. Two-day unbonding, slashing exposure, choosing providers. All normal in Ethereum land. All foreign to someone whose reflex is self-custody and distrust.

One detail that stuck: Babylon's own docs show most delegators pick the largest provider and rarely adjust. That's not active participation. That's "set and forget." Just with more slashing exposure.

The capital moved. The habits didn't.

And if habits don't shift, Babylon isn't creating a new class of Bitcoin user. It's just giving existing holders a different place to park — with more surface area for loss.
#baby
$BABY

The headline everywhere is "Bitcoin-native security, no bridges, self-custody."

The fine print tells a different story.

@BabylonLabs_io isn't selling Bitcoin security. It's selling slashing-enabled Bitcoin security. And those are two very different things.

Here's the gap: the pitch implies you lock BTC, earn yield, and withdraw whenever. Clean. Frictionless. Just Bitcoin, but productive.

Then you read the unbonding mechanics.

To keep your stake slashable — meaning the protocol can actually punish misbehavior by burning BTC — Babylon needs to keep your coins locked for ~301 Bitcoin blocks (about 2 days) after you request withdrawal.

That's the hidden condition.

You can withdraw anytime. But if your finality provider equivocates during that unbonding window, your funds are still exposed. "Self-custody" is technically true. "No friction" is doing some heavy lifting.

This isn't a knock. Slashing requires locked collateral — that's how PoS works. But the marketing leans hard on "just like Bitcoin" while quietly inheriting the operational complexity of a slashing game.

So the real question:

When a protocol promises "Bitcoin security," do we mean security that's unconditional — or security that's conditional on the slashing game working exactly as designed?

Because those feel like different answers.
#baby
$BABY
Babylon promises "Bitcoin security." But slashing requires a 2-day unbonding window.

Spent some time looking through @BabylonLabs_io Phase-1 numbers, and one thing kept pulling my attention back.

The supply side showed up. Over 57,000 BTC staked, 135,000 participants, Cap-1 filled in 74 minutes. That was supposed to be the hard part.

It wasn't.

Babylon already has billions in native Bitcoin security sitting there. But the networks that actually use that security? Still mostly in the "planned" phase. Babylon Genesis launched in April 2025 as the first BSN. More are coming. But "coming" isn't the same as "productive."

Here's the contradiction that stuck with me.

The protocol has over 57,000 BTC waiting for something to secure. The infrastructure is ready. The security is there. The destinations aren't full yet. Most ecosystems struggle to attract supply. Babylon may have solved that so fast it exposed a different weakness.

Making Bitcoin security easy to supply may have been the first problem. Making it useful at scale may be the second.

The bottleneck has shifted. From getting Bitcoin in, to making that Bitcoin-backed security productive.

TBV can hold the BTC. It can't force the demand.
#baby
$BABY
$IDOL
$FIGHT
Is Bitcoin security easier to supply than to use?

One thing I keep circling back to after reading Babylon's BSN announcements is how different the selection process feels from typical ecosystem growth.

Babylon Genesis announced its first cohort of Bitcoin Supercharged Networks in July 2025 Osmosis, Sui, BOB, Manta Network, Corn, BirdLayer, and others. The framing was "BTCFi Summer," a circular Bitcoin finance stack across multiple chains. BSNs inherit Bitcoin staking security and access to BTC-native users. In return, they send their own native tokens as rewards to stakers.

That's the vision. But the process to get there caught my attention.

The first batch arrived through selection, not open entry. The announcement described these networks as "prepping to inherit BTC security" not already live with it. A curated debut feels different from an open ecosystem.

Here's the tension that stood out to me.

In most crypto ecosystems, protocols compete for projects. They offer grants, incentives, and support to attract builders. Babylon's approach feels inverted. The protocol has a scarce resource native Bitcoin security. BSNs need to justify access to Bitcoin-backed security.

That flips the usual dynamic. The question isn't "how do we get projects to adopt us." It's "which projects qualify for Bitcoin's security." The BSN announcement reads less like an open call and more like a curated debut.

That suggests one of the harder parts of building a Bitcoin-secured ecosystem may be not just the tech, but the curation around it.
@BabylonLabs_io
#baby
$BABY
$1000RATS
$GRVT
Should Babylon curate which projects get Bitcoin security?

One question I kept coming back to while reading Babylon's deployment rules was who the permissioned phase allows to build first.

Babylon Genesis requires teams to start a forum discussion, submit an on-chain proposal, complete a security audit, open-source their code and secure funding for the proposal deposit before deploying. Only approved contract code can be uploaded. Only whitelisted developers can deploy on mainnet.

The rationale makes sense protecting billions in staked BTC from unverified code. But it also means ecosystem formation is still being filtered before it becomes open.

That creates a real contradiction: the protocol is designed as a two-sided marketplace. But one side the demand side is still governed by a permissioned process. The documentation calls it "temporary," but without a public timeline in the docs I saw, that leaves room for interpretation.

The first batch of BSNs was announced in July 2025, including BOB, Osmosis and Sui. In practice, the earliest ecosystem is being shaped by selection before it is shaped by open competition.

The mindshare question here may be as important as the technical one. @BabylonLabs_io solved the supply-side problem of BTC staking. But whether developers and builders allocate their attention to a permissioned ecosystem and wait for it to open is a different kind of challenge. Mindshare doesn't wait forever.
#baby
$GRVT
$BANK
$BABY
Should Babylon open its permissioned phase sooner?