Canton Network is a public blockchain network built for regulated financial institutions, where applications written in the Daml smart contract language share data and assets while each party sees only the transactions it is entitled to see. Digital Asset announced the network on 9 May 2023 with participants including Goldman Sachs, BNP Paribas, Deutsche Börse Group, Cboe Global Markets and Microsoft.
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Its shared infrastructure, the Global Synchronizer, and its utility token, Canton Coin, went live on 1 July 2024. Since then the network has drawn DTCC, Euroclear and Tradeweb into its governance and applications. This page explains the mechanism, the token, the participants, and the limits.
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Canton Network is a privacy-enabled blockchain that links separate financial applications so assets, cash and data can settle together in one atomic transaction. Digital Asset created it in 2023. Institutions run their own nodes, keep their own data private, and connect through a shared, decentrally operated service called the Global Synchronizer.
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Digital Asset's launch release called Canton a "network of networks" and gave a concrete example: a digital bond and a digital payment, held in two separate applications, composed into a single atomic transaction so both legs settle at once. The founding participant list named 30 firms, among them ASX, Broadridge, Capgemini, Cumberland, Deloitte, EquiLend, Moody's, Paxos and S&P Global.
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Digital Asset, founded in 2014 according to its own boilerplate, describes Canton as the only public layer-one blockchain with institutional-grade privacy. That is the company's positioning, not an independent assessment.
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Each institution runs a participant node that stores only the contracts it is party to. Applications are written in Daml, which encodes who may see and act on each contract. Synchronizers order and confirm transactions across nodes without exposing contract contents to parties outside the deal.
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The simplified flow below follows the mechanism described in Digital Asset's 2023 release and the 2024 go-live release.
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The go-live release describes the Global Synchronizer as operated and governed in a decentralised manner, so no single party controls the service. Anchoring operators are called super validators, and each voted in favour of the July 2024 launch. Digital Asset also open-sourced the synchronizer technology as a Hyperledger Labs project named Splice, so others can run their own synchronization domains.
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Canton Coin is the utility token of the Global Synchronizer. Participants use it to pay traffic fees for using the synchronizer. It is minted as a reward by application builders and infrastructure providers who add utility to the network, and participants can use it for Canton-native operations around the clock.
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The July 2024 release says Canton Coin launched alongside the Global Synchronizer and was the first time a public network rewarded both infrastructure providers and app developers. That claim is Canton's own. Hardware wallet support arrived later: Canton lists an August 2026 announcement that Ledger added support for Canton Coin and privacy-enabled assets.
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This page does not quote a Canton Coin price, supply or market capitalisation. None appear in the primary sources used here, and those figures change daily.
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Canton's participants are mostly regulated market institutions: exchanges, custodians, banks, broker-dealers and market infrastructure. DTCC, Euroclear, Goldman Sachs, BNP Paribas, Broadridge, Tradeweb and Cboe appear across Digital Asset and Canton releases, alongside crypto-native firms such as Cumberland DRW, Copper and Zodia Custody.
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In the June 2026 funding release, Yuval Rooz, CEO of Digital Asset, said the company works with more than 700 ecosystem participants. That count is self-reported.
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DTCC and Digital Asset announced on 17 December 2025 a plan to mint a subset of DTC-custodied U.S. Treasury securities on Canton, using DTCC's ComposerX platforms, with an MVP in a controlled production environment during the first half of 2026. The announcement followed an SEC No-Action Letter to DTCC. The Canton homepage now points institutions to readiness materials for an October launch of the service covering tokenised Treasuries, equities and ETFs.
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The Canton Foundation governs the Global Synchronizer. It began as the Global Synchronizer Foundation, an independent U.S. entity supported by the Linux Foundation at the July 2024 go-live. DTCC joined as co-chair alongside Euroclear in December 2025. Super validators operate the synchronizer and vote on network changes.
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The go-live release describes the foundation's open governance model under the Linux Foundation. The DTCC release confirms the co-chair arrangement. The Canton homepage links the foundation at sync.global and calls the Global Synchronizer the network's decentralised interoperability backbone.
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On Ethereum, every node sees every transaction and contract state. On Canton, each node holds only the contracts it is party to, and the synchronizer orders transactions without reading their terms. Canton applications use Daml rather than Solidity, which means Ethereum tooling and contracts do not port directly.
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That design choice is the core trade-off. Canton gives institutions data confidentiality they cannot get on a transparent ledger, as described in the 2023 release. It gives up the open composability that lets any Ethereum contract read any other contract's state. For treasury teams that need assets on both kinds of network, stablecoin movement across chains becomes an orchestration problem, which is the layer where Eco routes stablecoin transfers between supported chains.
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Canton's privacy model limits what outsiders can verify, its Daml stack separates it from the largest developer ecosystems, and many headline statistics come from Digital Asset itself rather than independent measurement. Several flagship integrations, including DTCC's tokenisation service, are staged rollouts rather than full production at scale.

Digital Asset created Canton Network and announced it with industry participants on 9 May 2023. Governance of the shared Global Synchronizer sits with the Canton Foundation.
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Canton describes itself as a public network with privacy. Anyone approved can connect a node, but each party sees only the contracts it is involved in. Earlier Canton releases used the phrase public-permissioned.
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Canton Coin pays traffic fees for using the Global Synchronizer and rewards app builders and infrastructure providers who add utility to the network, according to the July 2024 go-live release.
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Yes. DTCC announced a partnership with Digital Asset on 17 December 2025 to tokenise DTC-custodied U.S. Treasuries on Canton and joined the Canton Foundation as co-chair with Euroclear.
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HSBC is listed among participants in Digital Asset's $355 million funding round, led by a16z crypto and announced on 11 June 2026.
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All dates, names and figures come from primary releases fetched on 30 September 2026.