On June 11, Digital Asset closed a $355 million funding round at a $2 billion valuation to expand Canton Network, the enterprise blockchain that has already supported the issuance of $6 trillion in tokenized assets. Andreessen Horowitz's crypto arm led the raise with a $100 million contribution.
The investor list is striking: BNP Paribas, HSBC, Citadel Securities, Apollo, CME Ventures, S&P Global, Coinbase Ventures, Broadridge, Tradeweb, the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, SBI Group, and more than a dozen other institutions across the US, Europe, and Asia. Getting all of them into one cap table is unusual — it signals that Canton has crossed a threshold from interesting experiment to must-have infrastructure.
Unlike public blockchains, Canton is built around programmable privacy. Each participant sees only the transactions relevant to them, and the network's smart contract framework is designed to comply with financial regulation rather than work around it. That's what makes it attractive to banks: they get the efficiency of on-chain settlement without exposing sensitive client data to counterparties. JPMorgan and DTCC are already building on it.
Digital Asset plans to deploy the capital on partnerships, acquisitions, and ecosystem expansion — aiming to make Canton the shared plumbing for real-world asset tokenization across bonds, funds, and equities. BNP Paribas and Franklin Templeton separately said at a conference today that tokenization could unlock hundreds of billions in capital efficiency across European markets.
Traditional finance isn't being disrupted by blockchain so much as it is choosing which blockchain to adopt. The $355 million just raised is effectively a collective bet from the industry's most powerful institutions that Canton is the answer.
