After spending years in the coin-mixing circle, have we all become immune to those promotional press releases about all kinds of “powerful partnerships”? Today you sign a memorandum with A, tomorrow you do a strategic cooperation with B—plainly, most of the time it’s just each other trying to ride each other’s hype, and they don’t even pay for a meal together. In a bear market, they split up as soon as things get rough. So when I look at a project, I don’t even care who they claim to know from the blurb in the whitepaper. I only care whether their interests are tightly bound to the same trench.
Lately, I’ve been digging into the backstory of Dusk, and their relationship with the Dutch NPEX exchange definitely caught my eye. This isn’t just as simple as following each other on Twitter. In Europe, NPEX is a legitimate, well-established, compliant “old money” venue. It’s under strict regulation by the Dutch AFM, holding hard-core licenses like a Multilateral Trading Facility (MTF) and crowdfunding (ECSP). It has helped SMEs raise over €200 million, and the platform is active with more than 10,000 real investors. If you understand how difficult it is to obtain licenses in traditional finance, you know what I mean.
What I find especially interesting is that Dusk went straight to invest money as early as 2020, acquiring roughly 10% of NPEX’s shares. Six years, brothers! What does that mean? It means they aren’t just putting on a show—real money went into the shareholder roster, locking both interests and risks into the same pool. Publicity copy can be deleted anytime, but the money they put in can’t lie. A fully orthodox, regulated exchange that’s willing to turn a crypto project into a shareholder—and even use it as the underlying technical infrastructure—is, by itself, extremely strong endorsement.
That said, even seasoned old-timers can’t just get carried away when evaluating projects. Let’s be objective: a 10% stake’s voting power is still limited, and the license ultimately belongs to NPEX itself. No matter how sexy Dusk’s “on-chain + compliant privacy” story sounds, in the end it still has to wait until the mainnet runs fully and introduces traditional assets for real—only then does it count as passing. It’s like two people get engaged: how well life goes after marriage depends on the post-marriage delivery.
Anyway, I’ll write this down in my notebook for now, and next I’ll keep a close watch on their execution. Brothers, when you choose projects in your day-to-day, do you get more attracted by hardcore technical parameters, or do you value this kind of genuine, money-backed business entanglement even more? Drop your thoughts in the comments!
@Dusk_Foundation #dusk $DUSK
Lately, I’ve been digging into the backstory of Dusk, and their relationship with the Dutch NPEX exchange definitely caught my eye. This isn’t just as simple as following each other on Twitter. In Europe, NPEX is a legitimate, well-established, compliant “old money” venue. It’s under strict regulation by the Dutch AFM, holding hard-core licenses like a Multilateral Trading Facility (MTF) and crowdfunding (ECSP). It has helped SMEs raise over €200 million, and the platform is active with more than 10,000 real investors. If you understand how difficult it is to obtain licenses in traditional finance, you know what I mean.
What I find especially interesting is that Dusk went straight to invest money as early as 2020, acquiring roughly 10% of NPEX’s shares. Six years, brothers! What does that mean? It means they aren’t just putting on a show—real money went into the shareholder roster, locking both interests and risks into the same pool. Publicity copy can be deleted anytime, but the money they put in can’t lie. A fully orthodox, regulated exchange that’s willing to turn a crypto project into a shareholder—and even use it as the underlying technical infrastructure—is, by itself, extremely strong endorsement.
That said, even seasoned old-timers can’t just get carried away when evaluating projects. Let’s be objective: a 10% stake’s voting power is still limited, and the license ultimately belongs to NPEX itself. No matter how sexy Dusk’s “on-chain + compliant privacy” story sounds, in the end it still has to wait until the mainnet runs fully and introduces traditional assets for real—only then does it count as passing. It’s like two people get engaged: how well life goes after marriage depends on the post-marriage delivery.
Anyway, I’ll write this down in my notebook for now, and next I’ll keep a close watch on their execution. Brothers, when you choose projects in your day-to-day, do you get more attracted by hardcore technical parameters, or do you value this kind of genuine, money-backed business entanglement even more? Drop your thoughts in the comments!
@Dusk_Foundation #dusk $DUSK