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Digital Asset, the developer behind the Canton Network, has closed a $355 million funding round led by a16z crypto, the firm confirmed Thursday. The round was oversubscribed against a reported $300 million target, valuing the company at approximately $2 billion.
The investor list spans major banks, trading firms, asset managers, and exchanges — a level of institutional consensus around a single blockchain project that the industry has rarely seen.
Participants include ABN Amro, Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, Apollo Funds, BNP Paribas, Citadel Securities, CME Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, HSBC, SBI Group, S&P Global, Tradeweb, and Optiver, among others. The breadth signals that Canton has cleared a particular threshold — the world's largest financial institutions have decided it is the infrastructure layer worth backing for bringing assets and workflows on-chain.
Why Canton stands apart
Most blockchain projects designed for financial markets face a fundamental tension: public ledgers offer transparency and decentralization but violate privacy requirements that regulated institutions cannot compromise on. Private ledgers solve the privacy problem but create walled gardens with no interoperability. Canton's design resolves this with what the company calls institutional-grade privacy — a technical architecture that allows institutions to transact on a shared ledger while keeping transaction details private from other participants unless disclosure is required.
That design choice matters for use cases that dominate institutional finance: tokenized bonds, syndicated loans, fund administration, collateral mobility, and cross-border settlement. None of these work on a fully public blockchain. All of them require multi-party data sharing with controlled visibility. Canton was purpose-built for exactly this.
"For capital markets to move onchain, institutions need infrastructure that reflects how they actually operate — with privacy, compliance, scale, and interoperability built in from the start," said Yuval Rooz, co-founder and CEO of Digital Asset. The company claims more than 700 ecosystem participants across banks, trading firms, and infrastructure providers are actively building on or connected to Canton.
The valuation context
Digital Asset was founded in 2014 and has operated largely outside the retail-facing crypto world, focusing on enterprise clients in regulated markets. The $2 billion valuation — secured before the company's potential public market debut — reflects a bet that institutional blockchain infrastructure will consolidate around a small number of winners, and that Canton has already achieved the design lead necessary to be one of them.
For comparison, Tempo, the payments blockchain developed by Stripe and Paradigm, raised $500 million at a $5 billion valuation. Circle's Arc blockchain raised $222 million at a $3 billion valuation, with backing from BlackRock and a16z. The market for institutional blockchain infrastructure is pricing in a similar winner-take-most dynamic, with Canton positioned as the settlement and asset layer.
a16z crypto General Partner Ali Yahya framed it as the clearest example of blockchain product-market fit in regulated finance: "One of the most compelling blockchain opportunities is no longer theoretical; it is emerging as real-world assets and institutional workflows move onchain."
Ecosystem expansion
The funding will support expansion of the Canton ecosystem — more assets, more applications, more institutional participants — and continued development of the network's interoperability with other chains and legacy systems. A key growth vector is collateral mobility: the ability to move tokenized collateral across institutions and use cases without requiring manual reconciliation or intermediary trust. That is where the efficiency argument for on-chain capital markets is strongest, and where Canton has attracted the most institutional interest.
The raise also marks the beginning of a formal partnership with a16z, giving Digital Asset access to the firm's expertise across company building, policy, and research as Canton scales. For an infrastructure company that has spent years navigating regulatory complexity across multiple jurisdictions, that policy relationship is as valuable as the capital.
