#dusk $DUSK @Dusk Looked closer at how Dusk pays stakers. Two funding sources, per docs: token emissions and transaction fees. Most projects treat that as a technical detail. For $DUSK #dusk @Duskfoundation, if regulated-asset settlement becomes the core use case, that split is the whole question of whether demand is real or borrowed.
Emission runs on a fixed clock — 500M tokens released over an 18 to 36 year schedule, independent of how much the network gets used. Fee revenue is the part meant to track actual activity: transactions from venues like NPEX settling through Dusk's compliance layer. Those are two very different demand engines wearing the same token.
What changed for me was noticing that "fees are paid in DUSK" doesn't mean fees are driving anything yet. Emission keeps paying stakers whether or not settlement volume shows up. Usage becomes demand only once fee income stops being background noise next to what's already scheduled to emit.
Next thing I want to check: the current per-epoch emission rate at this point in the 18–36 year curve, compared against total DUSK spent on gas across a recent stretch of epochs. That ratio is the actual test, not the settlement headlines