Wall Street Giants, Sovereign Wealth Fund Back Canton Network Creator in $355M Round

Digital Asset secured $355 million in new funding from investors including an Abu Dhabi-based sovereign wealth fund, according to a Thursday announcement from the firm behind the Canton Network.

The firm said that the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, through a wholly owned subsidiary, was among participants in the company’s latest funding round. The development follows the public, permissioned blockchain’s debut nearly two years ago.

The firm behind Canton, a network designed for financial institutions, said the round was led by Andreessen Horowitz’s crypto arm, a16z crypto. Other participants included some of Wall Street’s most prominent firms, such as Citadel Securities, CME Ventures, and S&P Global.

The funding round also drew participation from a number of investment banks and financial services firms from around the globe, ranging from South Korea to the Netherlands: William Blair, Hanwha Investment & Securities, BNP Paribas, HSBC, and ABN Amro.

The diverse group of backers underscores Canton’s global approach to bringing financial institutions on-chain through its “network of networks” architecture, which allows participants to retain complete control over systems that are connected to a broader ecosystem.

The new funding also highlights Canton’s growing adoption as a network for facilitating transactions involving real-world assets, or RWAs, such as bonds, equities, and commodities. The funding round featured crypto-native participants such as Coinbase Ventures.

Canton’s native token changed hands around 16 cents, a 12.3% increase over the past week, according to CoinGecko. The digital asset hit an all-time high of 19 cents in February.

“Blockchain adoption will be defined by practical, production-grade applications in the world’s largest markets,” Digital Asset CEO Yuval Rooz said in a statement. “For capital markets to move on-chain, institutions need infrastructure that reflects how they actually operate.”

Rooz highlighted Canton’s ability to support institutions’ privacy and compliance needs. Since the network debuted, Canton has gained more than 700 ecosystem participants, he added.

Because institutions have complete control over the assets they issue on the network, some blockchain purists have argued that Canton isn’t a true blockchain. 

“Many experts (ourselves included) consider it a glorified database in the cloud and not at all consistent with Bitcoin’s open architecture that is both trustless and permissionless,” TD analyst Lance Vitanza, for example, wrote in a February note.

Prior to the company’s latest funding round, Digital Asset had raised roughly $490 million in funding, according to Crunchbase. Digital Asset said the fresh capital will help it support the network’s continued growth, while deepening engagement with developers.