Three barriers have historically kept institutions from adopting crypto: blockchain performance, regulatory ambiguity, and privacy. The first barrier is largely overcome: Modern L1s and L2s can handle the scale, speed, and complexity that institutions require. The second is nearing resolution: The GENIUS Act is now law, the CLARITY Act is advancing through Congress, and for the first time, banks have something close to a workable rulebook for crypto.
The third barrier — privacy — has remained one of the trickiest design challenges.
Most public blockchains make transactions public by default. That’s the simplest way to make them verifiable. But over the past decade, crypto has made enormous advances in privacy technology, including zero-knowledge systems and privacy-preserving networks that dramatically expand what blockchains can do. As institutions move onchain, the challenge becomes integrating privacy with the operational realities of capital markets.
Some properties are non-negotiable: from finality and interoperability to selective disclosure, regulatory compliance, and coordination across multiple parties and applications. If a bank is trading Treasuries with another bank, it can’t have its positions, counterparties, or volumes broadcast to everyone. A repo trade between two institutions should be visible to those two parties, but not to every other node or competitor on the network. These are basic operating requirements in regulated finance.
Building systems that meet institutional requirements demands deep expertise in both cryptography and financial infrastructure. It requires knowing cryptography well enough to implement privacy at scale and financial markets well enough to understand the differing privacy needs of custodians, clearinghouses, asset managers, and others.
Most blockchain teams have tried to persuade institutions to adapt themselves to crypto. Digital Asset took the opposite approach, adapting crypto to institutions.
Yuval Rooz and Eric Saraniecki came from DRW and Citadel, two of the most active institutional trading firms in the world. They had firsthand experience with the infrastructure that underpins global markets — and its limitations. Shaul Kfir came from the cryptography side. He created libsnark, the library that would later power Zcash and become one of the most foundational blockchain privacy tools available today.
Together, the three founded Digital Asset in 2014 with a specific thesis: if capital markets were going to move onchain, privacy could not be optional.
Over the next decade, the team built Canton as a public, permissioned L1 designed specifically for institutional finance. Canton runs on Daml, Digital Asset’s smart contract language built for the messy reality of multi-party financial workflows. The key architectural decision: Participants see only the parts of a transaction relevant to them. Institutions can coordinate and settle across multiple applications atomically without exposing their full state to every participant on the network. Privacy is baked in.
Canton is already handling production workloads at scale. DTCC, the clearinghouse at the center of U.S. capital markets, is tokenizing Treasury securities on Canton. Broadridge processes more than $400 billion in daily U.S. Treasury repo volume on a Canton subnet. Tradeweb runs 24/7 repo trading and settlement on the network.
The list continues to grow. JPMorgan is migrating its tokenized deposit product to Canton. Goldman Sachs has issued debt instruments and a money market fund on Canton, and plans to run a Super Validator. Visa, Apollo, Circle, and Chainlink are already participating alongside more than 40 Super Validators powering the Global Synchronizer. Nasdaq, BNP Paribas, Bank of America, Lloyds, LSEG, and HKEX are also building on the network.
The protocol is governed by the Canton Foundation in partnership with the Linux Foundation.
We believe blockchain infrastructure is entering a new phase. The regulatory environment in the U.S. is becoming clearer, the technical foundations required to support institutional markets are now viable, and institutions are increasingly moving activity onchain.
The infrastructure that will support that transition is being built now. We’re thrilled to back Yuval, Eric, Shaul, and the entire Digital Asset team with a $100 million investment as they help make it happen.
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