让市场本身上链：Canton Network正悄然成为机构金融的新底层

Original | Odaily Planet Daily (@OdailyChina)

Author｜jk

1. A Proposal Approved in Just Three Days

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

Within the crypto space, this might appear as another instance of traditional finance entering the fray. However, if you have a deep understanding of the legal and compliance processes within traditional institutions like Visa, you'd realize that getting approval in three days is quite unusual. Visa's compliance team must have submitted this document with the caution and seriousness typical of the traditional financial world, and securing the highest weight level indicates that negotiations and due diligence were already completed beforehand. The proposal seen by the public is likely the result of months of collaboration between traditional finance and the crypto world.

Rubail Birwadker, Head of Global Growth Products & Strategic Partnerships at Visa, stated in a press release: "Many banks see the lack of privacy as the biggest obstacle to moving meaningful business onto the chain. 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 onto the chain without disrupting their existing workflows."

It's clear that Visa's entry signifies an endorsement of an already well-functioning institutional network, not a starting point.

Since 2017, each market cycle has seen a wave of traditional financial institutions loudly announcing their "exploration of blockchain," but very few have resulted in real-world business applications. This time, Visa chose to enter the governance layer of a blockchain, holding voting rights and participating in infrastructure decisions. Eric Saraniecki, Head of Network Strategy at Digital Asset, co-creator of the Canton Network, said in a statement: "Visa's participation confirms that this technology has moved beyond the experimental stage and into a production-ready phase."

Driven by curiosity about this collaboration, Odaily Planet Daily interviewed the Canton Network team. What exactly led to this partnership? And what made Canton, a project that has been under the radar for so long, the chosen one?

2. It's Not About Putting More Assets On-Chain, But About Putting the Market Itself On-Chain

To understand why Canton attracted 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 get more assets on-chain. Canton solves the problem of how financial institutions can conduct business normally on-chain. While the focus seems different, when it comes to specific design choices, the trade-offs are almost completely opposite.

Ethereum's global transparency is an advantage for retail investors but a barrier for institutions. Take a concrete example: a bank's foreign exchange trading desk. If every buy and sell order for USD or EUR were 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 in the opposite direction, squeezing out profit margins. Repurchase agreements between institutions involve the capital positions and collateral sizes of both parties. Leakage of this data poses a risk to the liquidity management of the entire institution. These limitations aren't directly related to regulation; they are determined by basic business logic.

Even if on-chain addresses are not linked to real-world identity, transparent trading on-chain would 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 controls into its design.

This method embeds selective disclosure of data into the protocol layer as a native L1 feature, rather than relying on application-layer patches. Specifically, only the direct participants in 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, with the transaction being completely invisible to all unrelated parties. Competitors can interact on the same network without exposing their respective positions or strategies.

We also inquired about the specific technical details. Canton explained: "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 positions or strategies. This is the mechanism that enables real markets, not just assets, to operate natively on-chain."

The Canton Network told us the summary of this design logic is: Data visibility control is foundational, not an add-on feature.

So, it's no surprise that the list of Canton's validators reads like a gathering of old money: Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, BNP Paribas, Citigroup, Bank of America, DTCC, Nasdaq, Broadridge, Tradeweb... These institutions join because this infrastructure allows them to replicate the successes of traditional finance, thus attracting liquidity over time.

Canton's list of Super Validators

3. Born on Wall Street, Slow Work Produces Fine Products

Canton was created by Digital Asset Holdings, founded in 2014 by Blythe Masters. A former star executive at JPMorgan Chase and a key pioneer in the CDS market, Blythe Masters brought deep connections and industry credibility from Wall Street. From day one, this company wasn't focused on building blockchain products for retail users; its target clients were strictly regulated financial institutions with real balance sheets needing to operate within legal frameworks.

Regarding its origins, we asked a pointed question: We saw Canton emerge in 2023. Why did it take until this year for a full-scale launch?

Canton's answer was: Slow work produces fine products.

The Wall Street pedigree dictated the entire project's pace. Canton admitted in the interview that this chain took longer to reach its current state than most L1s because, from the start, it dealt with regulated financial systems, building institutional trust, and truly integrating markets with real business activity.

This pace is completely opposite to the mainstream Web3 narrative. Most public chains pursue rapid launches, rapid ecosystem expansion, and rapid hype generation – TGE first, then "the team isn't really sure either." Canton's path was step-by-step negotiation: first securing DTCC, then Goldman Sachs, then JPMorgan Chase, then Visa, using their endorsements to bring in real business.

2026 is a turning point, not because of project marketing or the crypto bear market shakeout, but because, for the first time, the infrastructure genuinely meets institutional requirements with real balance sheet activity running on it. This is why now is the best time to pay attention to the Canton Network.

"So how much business has been onboarded?" we continued to ask.

4. On-Chain Activity on Canton

Canton's current data is an anomaly 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 transactions per day, and the number of ecosystem participants has grown by orders of magnitude over the past three years. These figures correspond to traditional financial activities: tokenized repos, treasury settlements, and cross-institutional collateral mobility. This isn't fabricated volume; it's real operations on institutional balance sheets.

We also asked which products are currently mainstream on the chain. Currently, there are several 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 JPMorgan Chase deposit, operating within the existing bank regulatory framework. For example, if two institutions settle a cross-border transaction using JPM Coin on Canton, it's fundamentally no different from what they'd do in the traditional system, except settlement is much faster and not restricted to business hours. Kinexys currently processes between $2 billion and $3 billion in daily transaction volume, with a cumulative total exceeding $1.5 trillion since 2019. This flow of funds will soon be operating on Canton.

DTCC's Tokenization of US Treasuries: In December 2025, DTCC, the US securities depository, announced a partnership with Digital Asset to tokenize a portion of its custody US Treasuries on Canton, targeting a controlled production environment launch in the first half of 2026, with expansion based on market demand. DTCC also co-chairs the Canton Foundation alongside Euroclear, directly participating in network governance.

DTCC processes securities transactions worth over $2 quadrillion annually, forming the core of the US capital market clearing and settlement infrastructure. To use a simple analogy, DTCC's role in traditional finance is somewhat similar to a central bank's role in the monetary system; no one deposits cash there, but everyone's stock and bond trades must pass through its backend. The traditional repo market only operates on business days; after Friday afternoon, you wait until Monday. However, on Canton, repo transactions can run 24/7, using on-chain US Treasuries as collateral, enabling real-time fund intermediation 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 are completed simultaneously in a single operation, without needing two separate steps or relying on intermediary institutions. For example, currently, when an institution buys bonds, the asset transfer and cash settlement are often separate processes with a time lag, counterparty risk, and manual reconciliation costs. Canton aims for these two events to happen concurrently – locked in one step with no time lag. To achieve this, both capital market infrastructure and payment infrastructure must be on-chain simultaneously. Canton already has a solid grounding on the capital market side; Visa's addition provides a true institutional anchor for the payment side.

Beyond this, it includes things blockchains are good at, like real-time cross-border capital flows and embedding programmable logic into financial transactions.

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

Other Use Cases Already Running

Tokenized repo is 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, with an agreement to buy the bonds back in a few days. Traditionally, this process only happens during business hours on working days, and fund settlement has delays. Tokenized repos on Canton are already available 24/7 with instant settlement. Several top-tier institutions have already completed real repo transactions across institutions, including over weekends, on Canton.

Collateral mobility is another scenario with 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 days, during which the assets are locked and unavailable for other uses. Canton's settlement model allows this process to happen almost in real time.

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

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

Simply put, they didn't explicitly mention RWA, but everything they said pointed to the needs of RWA.

In the interview, Canton also provided a general outlook for its roadmap: 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 will move on-chain earlier.

5. What Does the Token CC Represent?

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

Canton's description in the interview was quite 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 more institutional trading volume on Canton, the more CC is consumed by the network. 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 mechanism quite rare in the Web3 space: zero pre-mine, zero team allocation, zero VC allocation; all tokens enter the market through a fair distribution method. For institutional participants, this setting reduces concerns about someone holding ultra-low-cost tokens who could exit at any time in the secondary market. The rules are transparent and equal for all participants.

For average market participants, Canton exists more as backend infrastructure. Ordinary people are more likely to interact with it through exchanges, wallets, or financial platforms rather than directly interacting with the protocol. The improvements it brings – like faster settlement speeds, tighter bid-ask spreads, and better financial product terms enabled by lower operating costs – will gradually filter down to end-users through the product layer, rather than being directly perceivable to users.

6. Next Steps

The 3 to 5-year goal Canton outlined in the interview is not measured by on-chain TVL or token price. Looking at the specific goals Canton listed: Stablecoins become the standard settlement method between institutions, much like SWIFT wire transfers are today; major financial institutions, such as banks' lending, deposits, bond issuance, and product packaging, operate directly on-chain; cross-border capital no longer goes through multi-day settlement cycles typical of traditional systems but moves at near-real-time speeds; multiple asset classes are natively issued and settled on Canton, rather than being issued off-chain first and then manually synchronized to the chain.

Canton uses the word 'invisible' to describe itself in this future state: By then, Canton will simply be one of the underlying protocols silently driving global finance, much like TCP/IP for the internet or SWIFT for cross-border remittances today – users won't notice its existence, but nothing would work without it.

Of course, the road is still long. Regulation is highly fragmented across jurisdictions; what is compliant in Europe is completely different in Asia. Integrating with existing legacy systems is extremely difficult; bank core systems used for decades cannot be migrated overnight. Interoperability between different blockchain networks remains an unresolved technical challenge. Coordinating institutions on the same infrastructure involves complex interest dynamics. The Canton team didn't shy away from these issues in the interview, telling us: The technical bottleneck is no longer the biggest problem; the real challenge is how to achieve global adoption.

It's clear that changes in financial infrastructure never happen overnight. SWIFT was founded in 1973 and took nearly two decades to become the true standard for cross-border settlement. People use it now without thinking about how it came to be. Canton's current position is probably at the stage where 'no one has realized what it will become yet.' But for something that truly wants to become infrastructure, being forgotten might just be what success looks like.