Market Infrastructure / Future

The Future of Institutional Finance on Canton

Canton Network is a public Layer 1 blockchain with configurable privacy, built as a network of networks for regulated assets. Institutions use it today for repo, collateral mobility and digital bond issuance.

Summary

Canton Network is a public Layer 1 blockchain with configurable privacy, built as a network of networks in which independent Canton deployments interoperate through shared synchronizers. Each participant's validator holds only the data relevant to its own users, and applications are written in Daml, the smart contract language created by Digital Asset, founding contributor to the Canton Network.

How it works

Validators run the Daml contract logic. Synchronizers order and route encrypted messages between them without being able to read them, which Canton's technical primer compares to a postal service. The Global Synchronizer is a publicly available coordination service operated by super validators, known organizations, and paid for in Canton Coin at a fixed USD price per megabyte; every coin was earned by providing utility to the network, with no pre-sale. Governance of the Global Synchronizer sits with the Canton Foundation, formerly the Global Synchronizer Foundation, which DTCC joined as co-chair alongside Euroclear in December 2025.

Repo is the largest production use. Broadridge's Distributed Ledger Repo lets market participants agree, execute and settle repo on a single distributed ledger. Broadridge moved it to Canton, with contracts written in Daml, in 2023, according to Digital Asset. See our pages on Canton repo for how intraday and multi-currency repo work on the network.

Collateral moves across borders. On 24 February 2026 LSEG, Euroclear, DTCC, Tradeweb, Citadel Securities, Societe Generale, Archax, Cumberland DRW and TreasurySpring completed the first cross-border intraday repo using tokenized UK gilts on Canton, exchanging them for tokenized deposits in a non-sterling currency, with interest and risk terms written into the contracts. Digital Asset estimates about $300 trillion of high-quality liquid assets exist globally, and only 10-11% of that, roughly $28 trillion, is used as collateral at any given time.

Issuance came first. Goldman Sachs' tokenization platform GS DAP, built with Daml and Canton, went live in January 2023 with the European Investment Bank's €100 million two-year digital bond as its first transaction. Settlement moved from T+5 to T+0, completing in under 60 seconds through cross-chain atomic delivery versus payment. It was also the first syndicated digital bond by a public institution admitted to the Luxembourg Stock Exchange's Securities Official List.

Market infrastructure is joining. In December 2025 DTCC and Digital Asset said they would, for the first time, allow a subset of US Treasury securities custodied at DTC to be minted on Canton, after DTC received an SEC no-action letter for a tokenization service. They targeted a minimum viable product in a controlled production environment in the first half of 2026.

What these cases share is the interoperability model. Each application keeps its own data and rules, yet a single transaction can touch several of them atomically, so a repo on one application can use a bond registered on another and cash issued on a third. Each party sees only its own side of the trade. The February 2026 gilts repo tested exactly that across institutions that each run their own systems.

Business goal

Impact

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