When I write about Dusk now, I deliberately avoid the fluff of "what can a privacy chain do?" and focus directly on its deliverable: NPEX. Because if @dusk_foundation truly wants to bring regulated asset trading onto the blockchain, NPEX isn't just icing on the cake; it's the needle that tests whether the chain is a "financial-grade system." The most crucial point about the NPEX path isn't "having a trading application," but rather the addition of a very strict requirement: before placing/matching an order, the system must first confirm whether the transaction is currently permitted. With a regular blockchain's DEX, as long as you have a balance and the signature matches, you can enter the pool; but this isn't the case with NPEX. It must first pass a set of restrictions: whether the account is eligible to trade, whether the asset is in a permissible circulation state, whether the transaction size has triggered the limit, and even whether certain events have temporarily suspended asset trading. If these conditions aren't met, the order isn't just not executed, but shouldn't even be accepted by the system. This forces us to be extremely specific about "how to write the trading application." You can't just write matching logic and call it a day; you must make the "conditions for allowing a trade" a hard threshold that the executable path can read. Otherwise, once NPEXs scale up, the most critical problem will arise: orders come in, matching occurs, but it's only at settlement that it's discovered the trade shouldn't have been executed—this is tantamount to an accident in regulated assets. Therefore, when I look at @dusk_foundation's NPEX, I don't look at how many collaborations it claims to have; I only focus on one verifiable fact: is the trading entry point locked by restrictions, and do these restrictions occur before matching and settlement? Only when it truly makes "determining whether a trade is allowed" the first step in the trading path can an NPEX truly make compliance a systemic action, rather than just a prompt on the UI. #Dusk $DUSK @Dusk_Foundation