The last time a piece of infrastructure shifted the global economy, it was the cloud. Before that? The Internet. Now, we’re watching something bigger sneak in, quiet like a ninja, but with the balance sheet of a BlackRock. It’s called Canton Network, and it just raised its war chest.
Digital Asset, the team behind the Canton Network and the open source contract language DAML, just closed a $135 million funding round, co-led by DRW Venture Capital and Tradeweb Markets, and the cast of backers reads like a who’s who of the institutional power grid. Goldman Sachs, Citadel Securities, DTCC, BNP Paribas, Paxos, Circle Ventures, IMC, Polychain, QCP, Liberty City Ventures, 7RIDGE, Republic Digital, Virtu Financial, and Optiver all got in line. That’s not a cap table, that’s a G20 summit.
What’s wild is that CEO Yuval Rooz, once a trading desk lead at DRW and developer at Citadel, saw this coming back in 2014. Alongside Sunil Hirani, Don R. Wilson, Shaul Kfir, and Eric Saraniecki, he helped found Digital Asset in New York, back when blockchain was still that buzzword you dropped at conferences to sound edgy. Now, they’re moving trillions. Not in hype. In actual assets. Think tokenized bonds, repo markets, annuities, commodities, even life insurance. Over $4 trillion in tokenized real-world assets flowing through the system, with $2 trillion in monthly transaction volume on Canton.
But here’s the kicker, except it’s not a kicker, it’s the thesis. Most blockchains can’t handle institutional needs. Too transparent for finance, too private for regulation. Canton broke that catch-22. It’s the only public Layer-1 with privacy baked into the protocol, giving banks the compliance-grade security they need without killing interoperability. And that’s why Goldman Sachs, BNP Paribas, Nasdaq, and ASX are using DAML-powered applications. They’re not playing with Legos, they’re rebuilding capital markets from the bottom up.
The Global Synchronizer, Canton’s public MainNet, went live in June 2024, governed by the Global Synchronizer Foundation, formed with the Linux Foundation. And it’s not just software governance theater. It’s real, bank-approved protocol oversight, designed for composability at global scale. The kind that lets a repo agreement in Zurich interact securely with a money market fund in Hong Kong without the middlemen clogging the pipes.
This $135M isn’t about building something new, it’s about scaling what’s already working. Digital Asset isn’t pitching vapor. They’re already deep in the system. And with DAML integrating across everything from Hyperledger to AWS Aurora, their tech speaks fluent enterprise.
