I read the December 2025 announcement calling the @Dusk_Foundation and NPEX collaboration "Europe's first fully regulated blockchain-powered securities exchange" and went looking for the specific regulatory authorization that statement rests on.
What I found requires distinguishing between two different things the coverage consistently treats as one.
NPEX holds a Multilateral Trading Facility license from the Netherlands Authority for the Financial Markets, obtained in March 2018 under MiFID II. That license is real. NPEX has facilitated over €196 million in financings across 102 transactions for its 17,500 active investors. The regulatory standing is genuine and has been continuously supervised by both the AFM and De Nederlandsche Bank.
The MTF license covers NPEX as a trading venue.
It does not automatically extend to the blockchain infrastructure underneath it.
The EU's DLT Pilot Regime is the specific regulatory framework that authorizes trading venues to operate on distributed ledger technology with formal exemptions from standard settlement rules. ESMA's register of authorized DLT market infrastructures as of January 2026 lists three entities with permission. CSD Prague. 21X AG. 360X AG.
NPEX on Dusk is not on that list yet.
Dusk's own documentation acknowledges the DLT-TSS license as a future milestone, not a current authorization. The KuCoin institutional analysis states it directly: "Once the DLT-TSS license will be obtained, Dusk will start to massively onboard institutions."
Sat with that sequence for a moment.
A genuine MTF license operating on blockchain infrastructure that has not yet received DLT Pilot Regime authorization is a different regulatory position than "Europe's first fully regulated blockchain-powered securities exchange" implies.
The partnership is real. The regulatory journey it describes is still in progress.
#dusk $DUSK @Dusk
What I found requires distinguishing between two different things the coverage consistently treats as one.
NPEX holds a Multilateral Trading Facility license from the Netherlands Authority for the Financial Markets, obtained in March 2018 under MiFID II. That license is real. NPEX has facilitated over €196 million in financings across 102 transactions for its 17,500 active investors. The regulatory standing is genuine and has been continuously supervised by both the AFM and De Nederlandsche Bank.
The MTF license covers NPEX as a trading venue.
It does not automatically extend to the blockchain infrastructure underneath it.
The EU's DLT Pilot Regime is the specific regulatory framework that authorizes trading venues to operate on distributed ledger technology with formal exemptions from standard settlement rules. ESMA's register of authorized DLT market infrastructures as of January 2026 lists three entities with permission. CSD Prague. 21X AG. 360X AG.
NPEX on Dusk is not on that list yet.
Dusk's own documentation acknowledges the DLT-TSS license as a future milestone, not a current authorization. The KuCoin institutional analysis states it directly: "Once the DLT-TSS license will be obtained, Dusk will start to massively onboard institutions."
Sat with that sequence for a moment.
A genuine MTF license operating on blockchain infrastructure that has not yet received DLT Pilot Regime authorization is a different regulatory position than "Europe's first fully regulated blockchain-powered securities exchange" implies.
The partnership is real. The regulatory journey it describes is still in progress.
#dusk $DUSK @Dusk