Canton Network

A conventional public blockchain writes every transaction to every node, which is workable for a payment but not for a bond trade a bank is contractually required to keep confidential from anyone outside the deal. Canton Network solves that by giving each participant its own ledger, called a domain, and synchronizing only the parts of a transaction that both counterparties need to see across domains. A bank's collateral position stays visible to that bank and its counterparty, not to every other institution connected to the network, while the network as a whole still enforces that a transaction only settles when both sides agree.

Canton Network launched its mainnet in May 2024; Canton Network reports more than 700 connected firms and over 6 trillion dollars in tokenized real-world assets processed, alongside more than 300 billion dollars in daily US Treasury repo trades. Canton is built on the Daml smart contract language, originally developed by Digital Asset, the company that leads the network's development.

Canton Coin (CC) is the network's native token, but it works differently from ether or bitcoin. Canton Network states that Canton Coin uses a burn-and-mint model: transaction fees burn coins, and new coins mint based on measured network activity, going to validators and application providers that generate real usage, not to an initial sale or a venture allocation. Canton Network describes it as having no pre-mine and no VC allocation, with the token meant to track actual use of the network instead of trading volume.

This sets Canton apart from a retail token economy. The network carries no single public token that represents "Canton the asset" the way ETH represents Ethereum to a retail buyer; institutions that build on Canton mostly interact with it through the tokenized assets they issue or hold, such as a tokenized Treasury position or a fund share. Canton Coin is the fee and reward asset behind that infrastructure. Canton Coin has since become available to retail holders through wallets such as Ledger, and the network's core use is institutional: a set of interoperable ledgers for banks and asset managers, not a general-purpose public chain for consumer applications.

Goldman Sachs built GS DAP, its digital asset platform for issuing and settling tokenized securities, on Canton Network infrastructure. In December 2025, DTCC, the US clearing organization, partnered with Digital Asset and Canton Network to begin tokenizing a subset of the US Treasury securities it custodies, with a minimum viable product targeted for the first half of 2026. Connected firms include BNY Mellon, BNP Paribas, HSBC, Circle, Broadridge, Tradeweb, J.P. Morgan, Citadel Securities and Cumberland and Deutsche Börse Group participates in institutional tokenization.

An institution builds or holds a tokenized asset on Canton the same way it would on any other chain from a regulatory standpoint: custody of the underlying private keys needs a license, in Germany a BaFin authorization under the Banking Act (Kreditwesengesetz, KWG), and a token that references a security or a fund share is still a security or a fund share under the law that already governs it, not a separate crypto-asset category. Under the German Electronic Securities Act (eWpG), a bank can use tokenization in Germany to issue a security as a blockchain entry, whichever ledger it chooses. The DTCC Treasury tokenization pilot on Canton, and the GS DAP issuance and settlement platform from Goldman Sachs, are both aimed at exactly this: moving securities institutions already hold, under the rules that already apply to them, onto infrastructure built specifically for regulated finance, apart from any general-purpose public chain.

Canton Network and Chainlink have entered a partnership that brings data services from Chainlink to Canton, including Data Streams, SmartData products such as Proof of Reserve, and the Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP). As part of the agreement, Chainlink Labs took on the role of a Canton Network super validator, running a domain validator and a Canton synchronizer node and taking part in ordering and finalizing transactions across the network's Global Synchronizer. Canton also joined the Chainlink Scale program, which helps cover the operating costs of running oracle infrastructure on a network. The problem that Chainlink addresses for public chains also applies to Canton: a smart contract on Canton still needs a price or a net asset value from outside its own ledger, and an oracle network is how that data arrives. Other oracle networks active in institutional finance include Pyth and RedStone.

Canton Network sits in the same infrastructure conversation Finance Loop runs at its Investment & Digital Assets events. At Tokenization & On-Chain Capital Markets, a Point Zero Forum side event in Zurich, 21X, Franklin Templeton, DFNS, AMINA and Chainlink spoke on the infrastructure large institutions need for tokenized assets, the same question Goldman Sachs and DTCC answer with GS DAP and the Canton Treasury pilot. Finance Loop has also partnered with the Crypto Assets Conference of Frankfurt School and Deutsche Börse, whose parent group, Deutsche Börse Group, is itself a named Canton Network participant.

Canton Network is used to issue, trade and settle tokenized financial assets across institutions that each need to keep parts of a transaction private. Goldman Sachs runs its GS DAP tokenized securities platform on Canton, and DTCC is tokenizing a subset of the US Treasury securities it custodies on the network.

No. Both are blockchains that run smart contracts, but Ethereum writes transactions publicly to every node, while Canton splits participants into separate ledgers that synchronize only the shared parts of a transaction. Ethereum carries a broad, mostly public set of applications and tokenized assets; Canton was built specifically for institutions that need that privacy by default.

Canton Coin (CC) is the native token of Canton Network. Canton Coin works on a burn-and-mint model in which transaction fees burn coins and new coins mint based on measured network usage, distributed to validators and application providers. Canton Network states the token had no pre-mine and no venture capital allocation.

Goldman Sachs, BNY Mellon, BNP Paribas and HSBC are named by Canton Network as connected firms, and DTCC partnered with Canton and Digital Asset in December 2025 to tokenize a subset of the US Treasury securities it holds in custody. Deutsche Börse Group is named as a participant in the institutional tokenization work of Canton Network.

Yes, Data Streams, SmartData products and CCIP from Chainlink now run on Canton Network, and Chainlink Labs took on the role of a Canton super validator, taking part in ordering and finalizing transactions across the network alongside its role providing outside data.