Let the market itself go on-chain: Canton Network is quietly becoming the new underlying infrastructure for institutional finance

Original by Odaily (@OdailyChina)

Author: jk

1. A Proposal Approved in Just Three Days

On March 20, 2026, Visa, the globally renowned payment service provider whose logo adorns most bank cards, submitted a governance proposal to the Canton Network. According to a report by The Block, the proposal was approved just three days later, with Visa officially becoming a Super Validator on Canton at the highest weight level (Super Validator Weight 10). This marks the first time Visa has submitted a blockchain governance proposal.

In the crypto world, this event might appear to be yet another foray by traditional finance. However, if you are familiar with the legal and compliance processes inside traditional institutions like Visa, you would find the three-day approval unusually swift. Visa's compliance team would have submitted this document with the caution and seriousness characteristic of the traditional financial world. Securing the highest weight level indicates that negotiations and due diligence were fully completed beforehand. The proposal seen by the public is likely the culmination of months of close collaboration between traditional finance and the crypto world.

"Many banks see the lack of privacy as the biggest barrier to moving meaningful business on-chain," said Rubail Birwadker, Head of Global Growth Products and Strategic Partnerships at Visa, in a statement. "By becoming a Super Validator on the Canton Network, we bring Visa-level trust, governance, and operational standards to this privacy-preserving blockchain infrastructure, enabling regulated financial institutions to move payment operations on-chain without disrupting their existing workflows."

Clearly, Visa's entry signifies an endorsement of an already mature institutional network, not a starting point.

Since 2017, each market cycle has seen a cohort of traditional financial institutions loudly announce their "exploration of blockchain," yet very few have resulted in genuine operational businesses. This time, Visa has chosen to enter the blockchain's governance layer, holding voting rights and participating in infrastructure decisions. "Visa's involvement confirms that this technology has moved from the experimental phase to a production-ready stage," said Eric Saraniecki, Head of Network Strategy at Digital Asset, the co-creator of the Canton Network.

Driven by curiosity about this collaboration, Odaily interviewed the Canton Network team. What exactly made this partnership happen? And what made Canton, a long-standing project, the chosen one?

2. Not Just Bringing More Assets On-Chain, but Bringing the Market Itself On-Chain

To understand why Canton attracts Visa, we need to first look at the core differences between Canton and other blockchains.

Ethereum and Solana solve the problem of: How to get more people involved, how to bring more assets on-chain. Canton solves the problem of: How can financial institutions conduct business normally on-chain. While the focus seems different, when it comes to specific design choices, the trade-offs are almost entirely opposite.

Ethereum's global transparency is an advantage for retail investors but an obstacle for institutions. To give a concrete example, a bank's foreign exchange trading desk wouldn't want every buy and sell order for USD or EUR to be visible in real-time. Counterparties could immediately adjust their quotes based on this information, significantly increasing the bank's trading costs. If a market maker's positions and hedging operations were fully public, competitors could directly trade against them, eroding profit margins. Repurchase agreements between institutions involve details of their cash positions and collateral sizes, and the leakage of such data poses risks to the entire institution's liquidity management. These constraints aren't directly related to regulation; they are dictated by basic business logic.

Even if addresses aren't linked to real-world entities, transparent on-chain trading can alter the logic of the entire secondary market. No traditional financial institution wants its trades to be front-run. Therefore, designs like Ethereum and Hyperliquid are not optimal for large institutions.

Canton's approach integrates data visibility control into its design.

This method incorporates selective data disclosure directly into the protocol layer as a native L1 design, rather than relying on patches via upper-layer applications. Specifically, only the direct participants of a transaction can see its details, while the network validates it without exposing any sensitive data. Two banks can conduct cross-border settlements on the same shared infrastructure, but the transaction remains completely invisible to all unrelated parties. Competitors can interact on the same network without exposing their positions and strategies.

We also inquired about the technical specifics. In Canton's own words: "Canton separates the coordination layer (shared across the network) from data visibility (limited to participants), achieved through isolated execution environments and selective synchronization. This allows institutions to trade securely and competitors to interact without revealing their respective holdings or strategies. This is the mechanism that enables true markets, not just assets, to operate natively on-chain."

The Canton Network told us that the summary of this design logic is: data visibility control is a fundamental requirement, not an add-on feature.

So, it's no surprise that Canton's validator list reads like a who's-who of old money: Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, BNP Paribas, Citi, Bank of America, DTCC, Nasdaq, Broadridge, Tradeweb... These institutions joined because this infrastructure allows them to replicate their traditional financial successes on-chain, which is why liquidity will slowly flow in.

Canton's Super Validator List

3. Born on Wall Street, Slow and Steady Wins the Race

Canton was created by Digital Asset Holdings, founded in 2014 by Blythe Masters. A former star executive at JPMorgan, Masters is one of the key pioneers in the credit default swap (CDS) market, possessing deep connections and strong industry credibility on Wall Street. From day one, the company was not built for retail-oriented blockchain products; its target clients were regulated financial institutions with real balance sheets operating within legal frameworks.

Given this background, we asked a pointed question: We saw Canton's launch in 2023, why did it only fully launch this year?

Canton's answer: good things take time.

The Wall Street pedigree dictated the project's entire pace. Canton admitted in the interview that this chain took longer than other L1s to reach its current stage because it has been dealing from the start with regulated financial systems, building institutional trust, and figuring out how to genuinely connect with markets that have real business volume.

This pace is completely opposite to the dominant Web3 narrative. Most public chains pursue rapid launch, rapid ecosystem expansion, and rapid hype generation, followed by a Token Generation Event, leaving the team uncertain afterward. Canton's path involved step-by-step negotiations: first DTCC, then Goldman Sachs, then JPMorgan, then Visa, leveraging their endorsements to attract real business.

2026 is a turning point, not because of project marketing or the crypto winter reshuffling the deck, but because, beyond the narrative, the infrastructure has, for the first time, truly met institutional requirements: real balance sheet activity is taking place on it. This is why now is the best time to pay attention to Canton Network.

"So, how much business has actually been brought on?" we pressed further.

4. On-Chain Activity on Canton

Canton's current data is an outlier in the broader blockchain industry, and the nature of these numbers is very different from most public chains. Currently, the Canton Network processes over $9 trillion monthly, with hundreds of thousands of daily transactions, and the number of ecosystem participants has grown by orders of magnitude in the past three years. These figures represent real traditional financial activities: tokenized repos, treasury settlements, and cross-institutional collateral movements. This is not fabricated volume; it represents actual operations on institutional balance sheets.

We also asked which products dominate the chain currently. Here are the flagship products:

JPMorgan's JPM Coin: In January 2026, JPMorgan's Kinexys division announced the native deployment of JPM Coin onto the Canton Network. Unlike USDT or USDC, JPM Coin is a deposit token representing a direct claim on a deposit at JPMorgan, operating within the existing banking regulatory framework. For instance, when two institutions use JPM Coin on Canton to settle a cross-border transaction, it's functionally identical to what they do in the traditional system, but settlement is much faster, and operations are no longer confined to business hours. Kinexys currently processes between $2 and $3 billion in daily transaction volume, with a cumulative total exceeding $1.5 trillion since 2019. This flow of capital will soon be running on Canton.

DTCC's US Treasury Tokenization: In December 2025, the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC) announced a partnership with Digital Asset to tokenize a portion of the US Treasuries it holds in custody on the Canton Network. The goal was to launch an initial version in a controlled production environment by the first half of 2026, with expansion following market demand. DTCC also jointly serves as the co-chair of the Canton Foundation alongside Euroclear, directly participating in network governance.

DTCC processes securities transactions worth over $2 quadrillion annually and is the core of the clearing and settlement infrastructure for the entire US capital market. An intuitive analogy would be that DTCC's role in traditional finance is somewhat like the People's Bank of China (PBoC) in China—no one keeps deposits there, but nearly all stock and bond trades must pass through its backend systems. The traditional repo market only operates on business days; activity halts after Friday afternoon until Monday. However, on Canton, repo transactions can run 24/7, using on-chain US Treasuries as collateral, enabling real-time capital financing across institutions, time zones, and weekends.

So, what will Visa do on Canton?

A core goal described by Canton in the interview is atomic settlement: the buyer's payment and the seller's asset delivery occur simultaneously in the same operation, without needing two separate steps or relying on an intermediary to bridge them. For example, currently, when an institution buys a batch of bonds, the asset transfer and cash settlement are often separate processes, leaving a time gap, counterparty risk, and manual reconciliation costs. Canton aims for these two actions to happen simultaneously—a single, instantaneous lock. To achieve this, both capital market infrastructure and payment infrastructure must be on-chain. Canton already has a solid foothold on the capital market side; Visa's entry provides a true institutional anchor on the payment side.

Other areas include real-time cross-border capital flows and embedding programmable logic into financial transactions, areas where blockchains excel.

Canton believes that 2026 is the first cycle where infrastructure truly meets institutional requirements, which is why institutions like Visa are choosing to engage with blockchain infrastructure now.

Other Use Cases Already Running

Tokenized repos are currently the most mature use case. Repurchase agreements (repos) are the most common short-term financing tool between financial institutions. Simply put, Institution A sells bonds to Institution B for cash, agreeing to buy the bonds back in a few days. Traditionally, this process is limited to business hours and involves delays in funds settlement. Tokenized repos on Canton are already available 24/7 with instant settlement. Several top-tier institutions have conducted genuine, cross-institutional repo transactions covering weekends on Canton.

Collateral mobilization is another use case driven by real demand. Large financial institutions often need to move collateral from one account or institution to another, for example, moving bonds held at Institution A to Institution B to meet margin requirements for a derivatives trade. Traditionally, this process takes several days, during which the assets are locked and unusable. Canton's settlement model enables this process to occur nearly in real-time.

Digital bond issuance is another area where Canton holds an advantage. Canton mentioned in the interview that it currently holds over half of the global digital bond issuance market share. The reason is that Canton provides full Delivery-versus-Payment (DvP), complete bond lifecycle management, and multi-party coordination, allowing the bond's lifecycle from issuance to settlement to be a complete on-chain loop, rather than just tokenizing the asset and relying on off-chain processes for finalization.

Stablecoin settlement is an area accelerating with Visa's involvement. The goal is to enable stablecoin payments between institutions within the same compliant infrastructure featuring data visibility control, rather than routing them through public chains.

Simply put, without explicitly naming RWA, every point addresses the needs of Real World Assets.

Canton also provided a general outlook for its roadmap in the interview: in the medium term, corporate bonds, private credit, and trade finance will follow; in the longer term, equities are also on this path. The logic from existing use cases to this roadmap is consistent: asset classes with higher liquidity and more mature regulatory frameworks move first.

5. What Does the CC Token Represent?

For broader market participants, understanding what the CC token actually is, is an unavoidable question.

Canton's characterization in the interview was direct: CC is a "network utility asset," whose value is pegged to the volume of real financial activity occurring on the network.

This means demand comes from actual usage; the higher the transaction volume from institutions on Canton, the more CC the network consumes. The long-term drivers for the token include institutional transaction flow, stablecoin settlement volume, total on-chain assets, and the depth of interoperability between Canton and other networks.

CC has a token distribution feature that is quite rare in the Web3 space: zero pre-mining, zero team allocation, zero VC allocation. All tokens enter the market through fair methods. For institutional participants, this setup reduces concerns that someone holds tokens acquired at ultra-low cost and could exit by selling them on the secondary market at any time. The rules are transparent and equal for all participants.

For ordinary market participants, Canton exists more as backend infrastructure. Individuals are more likely to interact with it through exchanges, wallets, or financial platforms, rather than directly with the protocol. The improvements it brings—such as faster settlement speeds, tighter bid-ask spreads, and better financial product terms driven by lower operational costs—will gradually filter down to end-users through the product layer, rather than being immediately noticeable in a direct way.

6. The Next Step

Canton's 3-to-5-year goal, as stated in the interview, is not measured by on-chain TVL or token price. Looking at the specific goals listed by Canton: stablecoins become the standard for institutional settlement, just as SWIFT wire transfers are the standard today; major financial institutions can operate loans, deposits, bond issuances, and product packaging directly on-chain; cross-border capital no longer requires settlement cycles spanning days in the traditional system, but flows near real-time; and multiple asset classes undergo native issuance and settlement on Canton, rather than being issued off-chain and then manually synchronized on-chain.

Canton describes its desired state at that point as "invisible": By then, Canton would simply be one of the underlying protocols silently powering global finance, much like TCP/IP is for the internet or SWIFT is for cross-border remittances today—users won't notice its presence, but nothing would function without it.

Of course, there is still a long way to go. Regulation is highly fragmented across jurisdictions; what is compliant in Europe is completely different in Asia. Integrating with existing legacy systems is extremely difficult; banks cannot migrate core systems they have used for decades overnight. Interoperability between different blockchain networks remains an unresolved technical challenge. Coordinating institutions on the same infrastructure involves complex interest conflicts. The Canton team did not shy away from these challenges in the interview, telling us: the technological bottleneck is no longer the biggest problem; the real challenge is achieving global-scale rollout.

The lesson is clear: transformation of financial infrastructure never happens overnight. SWIFT, established in 1973, took nearly twenty years to become the true standard for cross-border settlements. People use it today without remembering its origins. Canton's current position is likely at that stage "before anyone realizes what it will become." But for something that truly aims to be infrastructure, being forgotten might just be the hallmark of success.