让市场本身上链：Canton Network正悄然成为机构金融的新底层

Original by Odaily (@OdailyChina)

Author｜jk

1. A Proposal Approved in Three Days

On March 20, 2026, Visa, the globally renowned payment service provider whose logo appears 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.

In the crypto world, this might look like just another instance of traditional finance entering the space. But if you understand the legal and compliance processes within traditional institutions like Visa, you'd realize that getting approval in just three days is highly unusual. Visa's compliance team would have prepared this document with the caution and seriousness of the traditional financial world, and the fact that they secured the highest weight indicates that negotiations and due diligence were fully completed before the public filing. The proposal we see is likely the result of months of collaboration between traditional finance and the crypto world.

Rubail Birwadker, Head of Global Growth Products and Strategic Partnerships at Visa, stated: "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, allowing regulated financial institutions to move payment operations onto the chain without disrupting their existing workflows."

It's clear that Visa's entry signifies recognition of an already mature 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 translated this into real business. This time, Visa has chosen to enter the governance layer of a blockchain, holding voting rights and participating in infrastructure decisions. Eric Saraniecki, Network Strategy Lead at Digital Asset, the co-creator of the Canton Network, stated: "Visa's participation confirms that this technology has moved beyond the experimental phase and into a production-ready stage."

Driven by curiosity about this collaboration, Odaily interviewed the Canton Network team. What exactly led to this partnership? And why was Canton, a long-standing but relatively quiet project, chosen?

2. Not Just More Assets On-Chain, But Making the Market Itself On-Chain

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

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. These different focuses lead to almost entirely opposite design choices.

Ethereum's global transparency is an advantage for retail investors but a significant obstacle 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, drastically increasing the bank's trading costs. If a market maker's positions and hedging operations were completely public, competitors could simply trade against them, squeezing out their profit margins. Repurchase agreements between institutions involve details of their cash positions and collateral sizes; leaking this data is a major risk to an institution's liquidity management. These limitations aren't directly related to regulation; they are determined by basic business logic.

Even without linking addresses to specific institutions, transparent on-chain trading fundamentally alters the dynamics of the secondary market. No traditional financial institution wants its trades to be front-run. Therefore, designs like Ethereum and Hyperliquid are suboptimal for large institutions.

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

This means embedding the selective disclosure of data into the protocol layer as a native L1 feature, rather than relying on patches from higher-level applications. Specifically, only the direct participants in a transaction can see its details. The network validates the transaction without exposing any sensitive data. Two banks can conduct cross-border settlements on the same shared infrastructure, but the transaction is completely invisible to all unrelated parties. Competitors can interact on the same network without leaking their respective positions or strategies.

We also inquired about the technical specifics. Canton stated: "Canton processes the coordination layer (shared across the network) and data visibility (limited to participants) separately, achieved through isolated execution environments and selective synchronization. This allows institutions to trade securely and competitors to interact without exposing their positions or strategies. This is the mechanism for enabling actual markets, not just assets, to operate natively on-chain."

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

So, it's no wonder the list of Canton's validators reads like a 'who's who' of old money: Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, BNP Paribas, Citi, Bank of America, DTCC, Nasdaq, Broadridge, Tradeweb... These institutions join because this infrastructure allows them to replicate the success of traditional finance, which is why liquidity will eventually follow.

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. Blythe Masters, a former star executive at JPMorgan Chase and a key pioneer in the CDS market, brought deep connections and strong industry credibility from Wall Street. From day one, the company wasn't focused on building blockchain products for retail. Its target customers were strictly regulated financial institutions with real balance sheets operating within legal frameworks.

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

Canton's answer was: slow and steady wins the race.

Its Wall Street origins dictated the project's entire pace. In the interview, Canton admitted that this chain took longer than other L1s to get to its current state because, from the outset, it has been dealing with regulated financial systems, building institutional trust, and figuring out how to genuinely connect with markets that have real business activity.

This rhythm is entirely opposite to the dominant narrative in Web3. Most public chains aim for rapid launch, rapid ecosystem expansion, and rapid hype generation – a TGE rollout followed by "the team doesn't really know what's next." Canton's path has been one of step-by-step negotiation: first securing DTCC, then Goldman Sachs, then JPMorgan Chase, then Visa, using their endorsements to attract real business.

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

"So, how much business has actually 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 daily transaction volumes in the hundreds of thousands, and the number of ecosystem participants has grown exponentially over the past three years. These numbers correspond to traditional financial operations: tokenized repos, treasury settlements, and cross-institutional collateral movements. These are not inflated metrics; they are real operations occurring on institutional balance sheets.

We also asked which products are currently dominant on-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 on the Canton Network. Unlike USDT or USDC, JPM Coin is a deposit token representing a direct claim on a deposit held at JPMorgan, operating within existing banking regulatory frameworks. For example, if two institutions settle a cross-border transaction using JPM Coin on Canton, it is essentially the same as doing it in the traditional system, but the settlement speed is much faster, and operations are no longer limited to business hours. Kinexys currently processes daily transaction volumes between $2-3 billion, with a cumulative total exceeding $1.5 trillion since 2019, and this flow of funds will soon be operating on Canton.

DTCC's Tokenization of US Treasuries: In December 2025, the US securities depository DTCC announced a partnership with Digital Asset to tokenize a portion of its custodied US Treasuries on Canton. The goal is to launch a first version in a controlled production environment in the first half of 2026, expanding based on market demand. DTCC also serves as co-chair of the Canton Network Foundation alongside Euroclear, directly participating in network governance.

DTCC processes securities transactions valued over $2 quadrillion annually, forming the core of the US capital market clearing and settlement system. To put it in perspective, DTCC's role in traditional finance is analogous to the People's Bank of China; no one can deposit cash there, but all stock and bond trades must pass through its back-office infrastructure. The traditional repo market only operates on business days, meaning a Friday afternoon trade must wait until Monday. But on Canton, repo transactions can operate 24/7, using on-chain US Treasuries as collateral, enabling real-time fund access across institutions, time zones, and weekends.

So, what will Visa be doing on Canton?

In the interview, Canton described a core goal as atomic settlement: the buyer's payment and the seller's asset delivery are completed in the same single operation, requiring neither two separate steps nor a middleman to bridge them. For example, currently, when an institution buys a batch of bonds, the asset transfer and cash settlement are often two separate processes, with a time lag, counterparty risk, and manual reconciliation costs. Canton aims to make these two things happen simultaneously – a lock-step execution with no time lag. To achieve this, both capital market infrastructure and payment infrastructure must be on-chain simultaneously. Canton already has a solid foothold on the capital market side; Visa's addition provides a genuine institutional anchor on the payment side.

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

Canton believes 2026 is the cycle where infrastructure for the first time 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 Repos are the most mature use case currently. Repurchase agreements (repos) are the most common short-term financing tools between financial institutions. Simply put, Institution A sells bonds to Institution B for cash, agreeing to buy them back a few days later. Traditionally, this process only works during business hours, and fund settlement has delays. Tokenized repos on Canton are already available 24/7 with instant settlement. Several top-tier institutions have already conducted real repo transactions across institutions and weekends on Canton.

Collateral Mobility is another use case with real demand. Large financial institutions often need to move collateral from one account or institution to another, e.g., moving bonds from Institution A to Institution B to meet margin requirements for a derivatives trade. Traditionally, this process takes days, during which the asset is locked and unavailable for other uses. Canton's settlement model allows this process to happen near-instantaneously.

Digital Bond Issuance is another area where Canton has 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 provide complete Delivery versus Payment (DvP), full bond lifecycle management, and multi-party coordination. The entire process, from issuance to settlement, can be completed on-chain without needing off-chain steps to finalize.

Stablecoin Settlement is an area accelerating with Visa's involvement, aiming to allow stablecoin payments between institutions to occur on the same compliant infrastructure with data visibility controls, rather than routing through public chains.

Simply put, they didn't explicitly mention RWA, but every word pointed to the needs of RWAs.

In the interview, Canton also gave a general view of its upcoming roadmap: In the medium term, corporate bonds, private credit, and trade finance will follow; further out, equities are also on this path. The logic from current 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, the question of what the CC token actually is is unavoidable.

Canton's characterization in the interview was quite direct: CC is a "network utility asset," and its value is anchored to the volume of real financial activity happening on the network.

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

CC has a tokenomic design that is quite rare in the Web3 space: zero pre-mine, zero team allocation, and zero VC allocation. All tokens enter the market via fair means. For institutional participants, this setup reduces concerns about entities holding ultra-low-cost tokens that could be dumped on the secondary market. The rules are transparent and equal for all participants.

For general market participants, Canton will likely function more as backend infrastructure. Ordinary people will interact with it through exchanges, wallets, or financial platforms rather than directly engaging with the protocol. The improvements it brings – like faster settlement, tighter bid-ask spreads, and better financial product terms enabled by lower operational costs – will gradually trickle down to end-users through these product layers, rather than being directly noticeable.

6. The Next Steps

Canton's 3-5 year goals, as outlined in the interview, are not measured by on-chain TVL or token price. From the specific goals Canton listed: stablecoins becoming the standard means of inter-institutional settlement, similar to how SWIFT wire transfers are the standard today; major financial institutions running core operations like lending, deposits, bond issuance, and product packaging directly on-chain; cross-border capital moving at near-real-time speeds instead of the multi-day settlement cycles of the traditional system; multiple asset classes being natively issued and settled on Canton, rather than being issued off-chain and then manually synced on-chain.

Canton describes its ideal state as "invisible": At that point, Canton would simply be one of the underlying protocols silently driving global finance, much like TCP/IP is for the internet or SWIFT is for cross-border payments – users wouldn'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; banks can't migrate their decades-old core systems overnight. Interoperability between different blockchain networks remains an unresolved technical challenge. Coordinating institutions on the same infrastructure involves complex political dynamics. The Canton team did not shy away from these challenges in the interview, telling us: The technological bottleneck is no longer the biggest issue; the real challenge is achieving global rollout.

It's clear that changes to financial infrastructure never happen overnight. SWIFT was established in 1973 and took nearly two decades to become the true standard for cross-border settlement. People use it now without thinking about its origins. Canton's current position is likely analogous to that "before anyone realizes what it will become" phase. But for something that truly aspires to be infrastructure, being forgotten might be the hallmark of success.