Original article from: Canton official blog

Historically, the narratives of "traditional finance (TradFi)" and "decentralized finance (DeFi)" have represented a flawed choice: either accept the controls and safeguards of traditional financial markets or embrace the speed, transparency, and composability of decentralized finance, which thrives on the fringes of markets. The Canton Network ecosystem demonstrates that the barriers that once separated these two worlds are now crumbling. At their intersection, true opportunities are emerging.

Canton Network is breaking down the trade-off between traditional and decentralized finance by combining the privacy and control that institutions need with the composability, decentralization, and innovative network economics of public blockchains. This is a moment when the power of global finance meets the power of blockchain.

What makes Canton attractive to institutional and crypto capital markets?

By 2025, Canton Network had experienced explosive growth. Today, Canton Network has approximately 600 monthly validators, with over 15 million transactions using Canton Coin. Traditional institutions, application developers, and leaders in the crypto market are collaborating on Canton to achieve massive market transformation.

Canton has earned the trust of industry leaders such as Goldman Sachs, BNP Paribas, HSBC, Broadridge, and Circle, enabling traditional finance and DeFi-like business models to operate collaboratively on a large scale on the same track. In terms of results, applications on Canton now handle over $6 trillion in on-chain assets and over $280 billion in daily U.S. Treasury repurchase transactions.

Positioned as an AllFi blockchain, Canton offers institutions and crypto-native developers a viable path to assemble real-world financial transactions at crypto speed, without forcing adopters to choose between TradFi and DeFi.

Explore the Canton ecosystem

Below is an ecosystem guide to help users quickly explore Canton's diverse, interconnected applications, assets, and services.

Tokenized assets

On Canton, once assets are tokenized, they exist on an L1 network serving as a trusted on-chain ledger and record, providing issuers, custodians, and regulators with a source of fact. On-chain signifies direct ownership, not merely the synthesis of assets. This means the rights and obligations of issuers, investors, and all those in between can be enforced and relied upon at the protocol level. Simultaneously, the transfer of these assets is protected by granular privacy controls.

From real-world financial assets such as bonds, repurchase agreements, money market funds, loan commitments, insurance, mortgages, and private equity, to encapsulated crypto assets seeking institutional adoption (such as CBTC), assets on Canton are composable across applications on the network and are increasingly supported by the network's growing ecosystem of wallets and custody services. The result is a seamless workflow combined with privacy safeguards, unlocking asset utility and investor confidence.

Stablecoins

Canton Network provides a privacy and interoperability layer for regulated stablecoins, thereby unlocking their utility at scale in enterprise workflows and use cases, as well as for privacy-preserving payments and settlements. Whether for fund management and cash management, cross-border payments, margining crypto derivatives, or financing in 24/7 markets, privacy remains a hurdle for the widespread adoption of stablecoins. This is why institutions tend to choose stablecoins on Canton (such as USDC, Brale, and M1) as on-chain assets backed by collateral such as US Treasury bonds.

Stablecoin applications on Canton not only benefit from composability with institutional-grade real-world assets, but also from broader network integration—from leading forensic compliance providers to trading and margin management applications and custodians—making it a trusted venue for the growth of institutional stablecoin traffic.

Hosting

The Canton Network ecosystem includes a growing number of providers to meet the needs of traditional and crypto-native companies to easily and securely hold and utilize on-chain assets—from institutional-grade custody and wallet infrastructure to highly secure key management solutions.

Liquidity

Digital assets need distribution and easy liquidity to generate real utility. A growing ecosystem of businesses, from leading market makers and crypto liquidity providers to emerging trading platforms and exchanges, is driving network-wide liquidity in Canton.

Market makers such as QCP, DRW, GSR, FalconX, Flowdesk, and B2C2 have joined, laying the foundation for deep, composable liquidity across asset classes. These companies provide liquidity for on-chain tools and leverage privacy-enabled assets on Canton as they open up new use cases—from automating margin management to 24/7 funding using previously unavailable assets.

wallet

Canton Network's token standard, CIP-56, ensures seamless composability between wallets and assets for a superior user experience, supporting the thriving circulation and transfer of Canton's native assets (from Canton Coin to CBTC, USDC, SBC, etc.). The ecosystem supports various wallet types—from self-custodial to custodial wallets, enterprise or personal wallets, and cold/hot wallets—allowing applications to connect with diverse user types, whether enterprise clients, high-net-worth individuals (HNWIs), or retail end-users. Emerging retail wallets, such as Five North's Loop, are designed for frictionless onboarding and everyday asset interaction. Wallets focused on HNWIs and SMEs (such as Bron), and leading self-custodial and hardware wallets (such as Ledger) are also coming soon to the ecosystem. Developers can also benefit from wallet tools that use Digital Asset's Wallet SDK to accelerate the construction of custom wallets, making them easier to integrate with the CIP-56 token standard.

Developer tools

Canton's open ecosystem includes a powerful suite of developer tools that enable both beginners and experienced developers to build, test, and release faster.

For learners, AngelHack recently launched the Canton Core Academy, offering interactive and concise learning courses to help developers build institutional-grade financial applications on the Canton Network. Users can learn about Canton's architecture, how to get started with Daml, and how to build an inter-institutional asset transfer application through the Academy's "Learn and Earn" tasks.

Canton's ecosystem also includes a comprehensive suite of frameworks, SDKs, and libraries to help developers build, deploy, and test applications on the network faster, thus accelerating time-to-market. Digital Asset's Canton Network Utilities are a powerful set of building blocks that enable digital asset issuers and their clients to quickly bring assets to the Canton Network. The Quickstart introduces developers to Canton's token standards and provides a template for hands-on learning how to build a full-stack application.

Node-as-a-Service (NaaS)

A growing number of enterprise-grade Node-as-a-Service (NaaS) providers are offering licensed connectivity, deployment, and validator management, enabling institutions to focus on providing value to their customers, such as pure managed services for DevOps tools, additional DeFi products, services, and integrations, rather than the cost of operating nodes.

Data and Analysis

The ecosystem includes a comprehensive suite of block explorers, dashboards, and analytics tools, enabling full-stack observability. This provides institutional users with the transparency they need to observe, audit, and analyze on-chain activity, while preserving Canton's privacy. Some key tools include:

• The Tie's public dashboard provides visibility into overall real-time network activity, token economics, and featured application adoption, enabling ecosystem participants to understand the network's overall health.
• The Canton Network browser, dedicated to Node Fortress, enables users to monitor governance activities and proposals.
• Coin Metrics' Canton Intelligence App is a powerful analytics platform that provides important features such as validator rewards, fee streams, application incentives, and sub-account movement.
• Proof Group's CantonScan enables users to explore and search blockchains by participant and track individual token activity, laying the foundation for institutional-grade auditability.
• RWA.xyz, a leading dashboard for tokenized real-world assets, has been integrated with Kaiko, a Canton service provider.
• 5N Lighthouse supports real-time data from supervalidators and validators, making it easy for users to track governance decisions, monitor transactions in real time, and view the interaction between applications and the network.

Payment

Canton Network's architecture supports instant and automated payment-to-payment (PvP) workflows, aiming to bring a wide range of real-world payments on-chain, including business-to-business (B2B) payments, payroll, remittances, cross-border transactions, and cash management. Unlike other public L1 blockchains, Canton is a public network with privacy-preserving workflows that prevent institutions from broadcasting sensitive payment data worldwide. Canton Network includes a growing number of payment verticals, enhancing the security and reliability of digital payments on the network, including Bitwave (a B2B cross-border payment network), Paysafe (a leading global payment platform), and Worldpay (a global payment technology provider).

Forensics and Security

A growing number of compliance and attestation providers have integrated into the ecosystem to support compliance and transaction monitoring, including:

• Elliptic provides on-chain AML (anti-money laundering) monitoring solutions trusted by regulatory agencies.
• TRM Labs provides blockchain analytics solutions for detecting and investigating crypto-related fraud and financial crimes.
• On-chain AML monitoring enables individual operators to define their own compliance parameters—ensuring alignment with regulatory requirements and institutional risk management. Combined with Canton's selective disclosure capabilities, Canton provides a sophisticated approach to regulatory oversight and compliance.

Interoperability

Canton is the backbone of all applications and network interoperability within the Canton ecosystem—connecting fragmented systems in global finance through a secure and compliant infrastructure. Canton's ecosystem plans to support cross-chain interoperability services from leading interoperability solutions such as Chainlink, LayerZero, and Wormhole, further opening up to other ecosystems and allowing them to benefit from the unique capabilities, functionalities, and applications of the Canton Network.