Digital Asset raises $355 million for Canton Network led by a16z crypto

Digital Asset, the developer of the Canton Network, said it completed a $355 million equity financing led by a16z crypto, with backing from investors across traditional finance and digital assets. Participants included a subsidiary of Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, Apollo Funds, BNP Paribas, Citadel Securities, CME Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, HSBC, S&P Global, SBI Group, SoFi and Tradeweb. The new details sharpen the case behind the financing: a16z crypto is framing privacy as a key requirement for moving more of global finance on-chain, arguing that fully transparent ledgers can be a barrier for banks, asset managers and other institutions that do not want transaction information, payment flows or counterparty relationships exposed. The firm said modern blockchains are now reaching the scale and functionality institutions need, while U.S. regulatory progress, including the GENIUS Act becoming law and the CLARITY Act advancing through Congress, is helping create a more workable framework for digital assets. Digital Asset said the capital will support institutional partnerships, mergers and acquisitions, and related projects tied to Canton, which it has described as supporting about $6 trillion in issued assets. The network is designed for regulated finance so participants can transact across shared infrastructure while seeing only the parts of a transaction relevant to them. a16z said that architecture allows institutions to settle across multiple applications without exposing their full state to every node. Digital Asset was founded in 2014 by Yuval Rooz, Eric Saraniecki and Shaul Kfir. The network already supports production activity across large financial firms: DTCC is tokenizing Treasury securities on Canton, Broadridge runs more than $400 billion in daily U.S. Treasury repo volume through a Canton subnet, Tradeweb operates around-the-clock repo trading and settlement on the network, JPMorgan is migrating its tokenized deposit product to Canton, and Goldman Sachs has issued debt instruments and a money market fund on the network and plans to operate a Super Validator node. More than 40 Super Validators, including Visa, Apollo, Circle and Chainlink, power the Canton Global Synchronizer, while governance sits with the Canton Foundation in partnership with the Linux Foundation.