Canton

The Canton Network is a public, permissionless Layer 1 blockchain designed for institutional finance, combining configurable on-chain privacy with compliance and interoperability requirements of regulated markets. It was announced in May 2023 by a consortium of banks, exchanges and technology firms — including BNP Paribas, Capgemini, Cboe, Deloitte, Deutsche Börse, Digital Asset, Goldman Sachs, Microsoft, Moody's and Paxos — as an effort to modernize post-trade processes in global financial markets. The network was initially developed by Digital Asset, a blockchain company founded in 2014, and has since been open-sourced.

Canton is architected as a "network of networks": each participating institution operates its own ledger and connects to others through a shared synchronization layer, the Global Synchronizer, which serves as the interoperability backbone. This design supports atomic multi-party transactions that either complete in full or not at all, while restricting transaction visibility to the parties involved through cryptographic controls and a two-tier consensus model intended to allow horizontal scaling with smart contract interoperability across the network. Smart contracts are written in Digital Asset's Daml language.

Asset classes and workflows deployed or piloted on Canton include bonds, money market funds, alternative funds, commodities, repurchase agreements, mortgages, life insurance, annuities, tokenized deposits and tokenized Treasury securities, alongside use cases in collateral mobility, settlement and payments. Governance sits with the Canton Foundation, previously the Global Synchronizer Foundation, which oversees the Global Synchronizer and sets policies for protocol updates and node participation.

Founding story

Canton and its Daml smart contract language were developed by Digital Asset, founded in 2014, whose founders include Don Wilson (founder and CEO of DRW), Yuval Rooz (co-founder and CEO, previously at Citadel and DRW), Eric Saraniecki (previously DRW, co-founder of Cumberland) and Shaul Kfir (co-author of libsnark, co-founder of Bits of Gold). The network itself was launched as a consortium effort to modernize post-trade processes in global financial markets.

Business model

Canton operates as shared network infrastructure rather than a single vendor product: institutions connect validators, tokenize assets and launch applications on the chain, while infrastructure operators and application providers run network services. The economic model centers on the native utility token, Canton Coin (CC), used to pay application and infrastructure fees on the Global Synchronizer and to reward participants. Digital Asset, the network's creator, builds and operationalizes Canton in partnership with financial institutions and technology providers.

Transaction fees are calculated per unit of bandwidth, set in U.S. dollars and paid in Canton Coin; those fees are burned, while new coins are minted as rewards for super validators running the Global Synchronizer, validators running full nodes, and application providers, according to a mining curve with halvings.

Traction

The Global Synchronizer MainNet and Canton Coin went live in July 2024. In March 2024, institutions including Goldman Sachs, BNY Mellon and Cboe completed testing of the network. In October 2024, 27 market participants including Euroclear, the World Gold Council and Clifford Chance completed a pilot tokenizing gilts, eurobonds and gold. In November 2024, Singapore-regulated custodian Hydra X became the first APAC custodian to provide custody for Canton Coin. By June 2026 the ecosystem exceeded 700 participants, and subsequent activity included a DTCC agreement to tokenize a subset of DTC-custodied U.S. Treasury securities targeted for 2026, an HSBC tokenized deposit pilot, an S&P tokenized Treasurys index, and Japanese government bond repo and multi-chain wallet initiatives with BOOSTRY and Secured Finance.

Latest developments

In June 2026, Digital Asset announced a $355 million round led by a16z crypto to accelerate Canton's role as onchain infrastructure for capital markets; in July 2026 the round was expanded by $10 million with Shinhan Financial Group and SC Ventures at the same $2 billion equity valuation, bringing the total to $365 million. DTCC and Digital Asset announced plans to tokenize a subset of DTC-custodied U.S. Treasury securities on Canton, targeted for 2026. Other 2026 developments include an HSBC tokenized deposit pilot, S&P tokenizing a Treasurys index, a BOOSTRY partnership for a multi-chain wallet service, a Mitsubishi UFJ Trust and Banking proof-of-concept for onchain Japanese government bond repo with Secured Finance, and a benefit-distribution pilot with the American Idea Foundation.