This Week in Digital Assets: Canton network’s parent company digital asset raises megaround
< BlogDigital Asset, the company that developed the privacy-preserving Canton Network, has secured a $135 million strategic equity round led by DRW and Tradeweb with participation from Goldman Sachs, Citadel Securities, BNP Paribas, DTCC, among others.
Canton connects the distributed-ledger systems that large financial institutions already operate in-house, giving them a common settlement layer without exposing positions on public blockchains. At $135 million, the raise is 2025’s second-largest venture deal in this space after Binance’s $2 billion round. In our view, this signals that risk capital is consolidating around safe-harbor themes—dominant retail venues on one side and regulated tokenization infrastructure on the other.
Recent network data suggest the Canton Network has moved beyond pilot status. Daily cash transfers via its Canton Coin, the network’s settlement token, now exceed two million transfers, up from fewer than 100,000 in mid-March[1]. That traffic already more than doubles Fedwire message volume and outpaces most other permissioned chains, reflecting increased use for repo, structured-note issuance, and intraday collateral mobility as additional traditional financial institutions link their internal ledgers to Canton[2].
Canton’s appeal lies in asset-specific compliance and configurable privacy. Institutions can define permission sets trade by trade, making it suitable for bilateral repo, commercial-paper programs, and collateralized notes—asset classes that require confidentiality and deterministic settlement finality.
Public blockchain tokenization efforts on Avalanche, Polygon, or subnet models still struggle to offer comparable control at scale without sacrificing operational efficiency. We therefore expect large volume, balance-sheet-sensitive instruments to migrate to Canton first, while lighter-touch public solutions continue to service smaller institutions and retail flows.
We anticipate the network’s growth to accelerate. Circle plans to bring USDC and the $1.5 billion USYC fund onto Canton, and DRW- and Virtu-backed desks are automating hedge and funding trades through native smart contracts.
We project Canton will process five million transfers per day by Q4 2025 and settle more than $10 trillion of tokenized assets during 2026. Key milestones include the number of live issuers, the share of same-day repo moving to T+0 tokenized settlement, and the volume of cross-border FX instructions routed through Canton. With this capital infusion and a roster of tier-one backers, we believe Canton is on track to become the default backend for regulated finance, compelling other tokenization initiatives either to interoperate with Canton or risk ceding institutional volume to a network that is already scaling in production.
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