Canton Network Closes $355 Million Round Led by a16z Crypto

Digital Asset closed a $355 million funding round for the Canton Network on Thursday, with a16z crypto leading a syndicate that included HSBC, Broadridge, Tradeweb, Apollo Funds, Citadel Securities, BNP Paribas, and CME Ventures. The raise priced the company at a $2 billion valuation, beating the $300 million target reported last month. The round drew names that are also the network’s largest production operators, alongside financial backers.

Canton is a public, permissioned Layer-1 blockchain built for regulated finance, and the roster that joined the round is the same set of firms already running live production on it. The new capital and a formal a16z crypto partnership fund the network’s expansion in regulated capital markets.

Canton Network Closes $355 Million Round Led by a16z Crypto

Digital Asset announced the $355 million round on June 11, with a16z crypto as the lead investor. Financial Technology Partners served as the exclusive strategic and financial advisor on the transaction, the company said in Digital Asset’s capital raise announcement for Canton. The full roster, as printed, includes 7RIDGE, ABN Amro, the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority (through a wholly owned subsidiary), Alumni Ventures, Apollo Funds, BNP Paribas, Broadridge, Citadel Securities, CME Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, Greenwulf Asset Management, Hanwha Investment & Securities, HSBC, iCapital, Liberty City Ventures, Optiver, Polychain, R136 Ventures, S&P Global, SBI Group, Smash Capital, SoFi, Tradeweb, and William Blair. Several names are first-time investors; others, including S&P Global and iCapital, returned from a $50 million extension Digital Asset closed in December 2025.

The round also formalises a partnership that gives Digital Asset access to a16z crypto’s networks in company building, policy, and research. a16z crypto’s specific commitment, the firm said in its own investment note, is $100 million.

Digital Asset co-founder and CEO Yuval Rooz framed the raise as a step toward making Canton the core infrastructure for global finance. “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,” Rooz said in the press release. “Canton was purpose-built for this, and Digital Asset is working with more than 700 ecosystem participants to make Canton the core infrastructure for global finance.” The company plans to use the capital to expand offerings across the Canton ecosystem, deepen engagement with developers and financial institutions, and support continued network growth. The use cases named in the press release, tokenization, collateral mobility, settlement, payments, and other regulated financial workflows, are the focus areas for the next phase of the network’s growth.

The Architectural Choice Wall Street Is Backing

Most blockchains built for financial markets fail on one of two fronts. Public ledgers expose every transaction to every participant, a non-starter for institutions with privacy mandates. Private ledgers keep transaction data sealed, but the result is a walled garden with no interoperability, which kills the network effects that make shared infrastructure valuable.

Canton resolves the trade-off with what the company calls institutional-grade privacy, a sub-transaction model that lets institutions share a common ledger while keeping counterparty positions, order flow, and volumes visible only to the parties that need them. The network runs on Daml, a smart contract language Digital Asset developed for the messy reality of multi-party financial workflows. a16z crypto called the design a clear case of product-market fit in regulated finance, per Why a16z crypto wrote its $100 million lead check. Canton’s design, Daml smart contracts on a public ledger with sub-transaction privacy, is what the press release describes as purpose-built for regulated finance.

The Wall Street Roster That Closed the Round

The press release, with a New York dateline of June 11, names institutional participants including sovereign wealth (the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, through a wholly owned subsidiary), major bank venture arms (CME Ventures, Coinbase Ventures), and established trading firms (Citadel Securities, Optiver). Several names in the round, HSBC, Broadridge, Tradeweb, S&P Global, and iCapital, are operators already running real workloads on Canton. S&P Global and iCapital returned from a $50 million extension Digital Asset closed in December 2025. The pattern is consistent: institutions with regulated, capital-market exposure taking direct equity in the infrastructure they intend to use. Cross-referenced with the existing Canton footprint, the roster shows the same firms on both sides of the cap table.

The investor list, paired with each firm’s existing Canton activity, lays out the relationship:

Of the seven repeat operators listed above, three, Broadridge, Tradeweb, and HSBC, are running or have run real capital-markets workflows, not pilots. The Broadridge subnet alone settles more than $400 billion in daily U.S. Treasury repo, a number that makes a pilot-versus-production distinction more than semantic. Digital Asset has also named DTCC, JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, Visa, Circle, and Chainlink as participants on the broader Canton network, though none of those names are in the investor list for this round. The roster, in other words, pairs round investors with the same firms already using the chain.

Why a16z Took the Lead Check

a16z crypto wrote a $100 million check into the round, the firm said in its own investment note, the largest single commitment in a syndicate that includes both the firm’s fifth crypto fund and a formal partnership. The fund itself, a16z crypto Fund 5, raised $2.2 billion in May, with total dedicated crypto capital across the firm’s five vehicles now running at roughly $10 billion. The partnership accompanying the lead check gives Digital Asset access to a16z crypto’s networks in company building, policy, and research, a structure that mirrors how the firm typically backs infrastructure plays.

One of the most compelling blockchain opportunities is no longer theoretical; it is emerging as real-world assets and institutional workflows move onchain. Digital Asset has built one of the clearest examples of blockchain product-market fit in regulated finance. We believe that Digital Asset is building foundational infrastructure for the next generation of financial markets.

Ali Yahya, general partner at a16z crypto, framed the deal in the press release as a vote for production workloads. a16z crypto’s investment note lays out the thesis in three institutional barriers. Blockchain performance is largely solved by modern L1s and L2s. Regulatory ambiguity is closing, with the GENIUS Act now law and the CLARITY Act advancing through Congress, while privacy is the design problem Canton’s sub-transaction architecture is built to address, per the same investment note.

The Institutional Blockchain Race in Three Priced Bets

Canton is one of three priced institutional blockchain bets, with Tempo and Circle’s Arc as the other two. The three chains target different lanes, with Canton on regulated capital-markets settlement, Tempo on payments, and Arc on stablecoin infrastructure.

Tempo, the payments chain developed by Stripe and Paradigm, raised $500 million last year at a $5 billion valuation, per a CoinDesk report. Circle Internet raised $222 million for its Arc blockchain at a $3 billion valuation, with BlackRock, Apollo Funds, a16z crypto, and ARK Invest among the named backers. Canton’s close at a $2 billion valuation lands between the two on price, with at least seven Wall Street operators in the cap table.

All three bets are written at institutional scale, and the a16z crypto fund behind Canton’s lead check has the size to underwrite the next leg of consolidation. Here is how the headline numbers compare:

What the Capital Funds Next

Digital Asset said the capital will support the next phase of growth on Canton, with the expansion of ecosystem offerings, deeper developer engagement, and continued network growth named as priorities. The new variable in the next phase is that the operator base is broader, and the regulatory backdrop is clearer, than at any prior raise. The round also marks the start of a formal partnership between Digital Asset and a16z crypto, with the firm offering access to its networks in company building, policy, and research. The capital will be deployed against the use cases named in the press release, which match the network’s existing production workloads at Broadridge, Tradeweb, HSBC, and Goldman Sachs.

The regulatory backdrop has shifted in the past year. The GENIUS Act is now law, and the CLARITY Act is advancing through Congress, two milestones a16z crypto’s investment note names as the closing of the regulatory ambiguity barrier. The broader institutional tokenization space is moving to public markets in parallel, with Securitize’s $1.25 billion NYSE debut as SECZ one of the latest moves.

• Tokenization: Goldman Sachs has issued debt instruments and a money market fund on Canton, with plans to run a Super Validator; DTCC is tokenizing U.S. Treasury securities on the network
• Collateral mobility: Moving tokenized collateral across institutions and use cases without manual reconciliation, the on-chain capital markets case a16z crypto’s investment note singles out as the network’s wedge
• Settlement: Broadridge processes more than $400 billion in daily U.S. Treasury repo on a Canton subnet, and Tradeweb runs 24/7 repo trading and settlement on the same rails
• Tokenized deposits and payments: JPMorgan is migrating its tokenized deposit product to Canton through 2026; HSBC has run a tokenized deposit pilot on the network