Digital Asset, the firm behind the Canton Network, has closed a $355 million funding round led by a16z crypto, pulling in a sprawling cast of Wall Street names and at least one sovereign wealth fund along the way.

 

Digital Asset, the company quietly building out the plumbing for tokenized capital markets, has just pulled off one of the bigger raises in cryptos institutional corner this year. The firm announced Thursday that it closed a $355 million round led by Andreessen Horowitz's crypto arm, a16z crypto, which alone wrote a $100 million check. The size of the raise, and the names attached to it, say a lot about where smart money thinks blockchain infrastructure is headed next ... and it's not toward retail trading apps.

 

The round's backer list reads like a who's who of global finance. Citadel Securities, Apollo, BNP Paribas, HSBC, S&P Global, CME Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, Optiver, SoFi, Tradeweb and SBI Group all participated, alongside a subsidiary of the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, one of the world's largest sovereign wealth funds. Smaller but notable names like 7RIDGE, Polychain, Broadridge and William Blair rounded things out. It's a genuinely odd mix of old guard TradFi and crypto native venture money, which is sort of the whole point of Canton in the first place.

 

What Exactly is Canton, and Why Does Wall Street Care

Canton is a layer-1 blockchain, but it doesn't look much like the chains most crypto users are familiar with. It was designed from the ground up for regulated finance, with built-in privacy controls that let institutions keep sensitive transaction data hidden from competitors while still settling on a shared, synchronized ledger. Digital Asset describes it as a network of networks, meaning banks and asset managers can run their own permissioned systems that plug into the broader Canton ecosystem without giving up control over their own data or compliance processes.

 

This is basically the opposite of how chains like Bitcoin or Ethereum work. There's no anonymous validator set, no permissionless access, and institutions retain authority over the assets they issue. Some purists aren't thrilled about that. TD analyst Lance Vitanza wrote back in February that some experts consider Canton a glorified database in the cloud, and not really consistent with the open, trustless architecture that defines Bitcoin. Fair point, maybe, but it also might be missing why banks are actually showing up.

 

Since launching nearly two years ago, Canton has reportedly supported around $6 trillion in tokenized issuance, and the network now counts more than 700 ecosystem participants according to Digital Asset CEO Yuval Rooz. That's a big number for a network most retail crypto traders have probably never interacted with directly. Its native token, CC, was trading around 16 cents at the time of the announcement, up roughly 12% over the prior week, though still well below its February all time high near 19 cents.

 

A Valuation That's Climbing Fast

This isn't Digital Asset's first rodeo with a16z. The new $355 million round comes on the heels of a previously reported $300 million raise from just a month earlier, which valued the company at close to $2 billion, again with a16z leading. Before that, in 2025, Digital Asset raised $50 million from backers including Nasdaq and Bank of New York Mellon. Add it all up, and Digital Asset has now raised somewhere north of $800 million across its various rounds, a pace that's hard not to notice in a sector where many infrastructure plays are still pre revenue.

 

Speaking of revenue, that's another detail buried in the announcement worth pulling out. According to reporting from ChainCatcher, Digital Asset says it has now reached profitability following this latest raise. For a blockchain infrastructure company, that's a fairly rare claim to make, and it's likely one reason institutional investors who don't typically touch crypto, like Apollo or HSBC, felt comfortable writing checks.

 

Where The Money is Going

Digital Asset says the fresh capital will go toward three buckets, forging new partnerships, pursuing mergers and acquisitions, and expanding the broader Canton ecosystem. There's also a developer angle here. Rooz has been fairly vocal about wanting to deepen engagement with the people actually building on Canton, not just the institutions issuing assets on top of it.

 

"Blockchain adoption will be defined by practical, production-grade applications in the world's largest markets," Rooz said in a statement tied to the announcement. "For capital markets to move onchain, institutions need infrastructure that reflects how they actually operate, with privacy, compliance, scale, and interoperability built in from the start."

 

Notably, this round also marks the formal start of a partnership between Digital Asset and a16z crypto, not just a check. Ali Yahya, a general partner at a16z crypto, framed it as a bet on a thesis that's been floating around crypto circles for years finally becoming real, real world assets and institutional workflows actually moving onchain, rather than just being talked about at conferences.

 

The bigger picture for RWAs

Zoom out a bit and this raise fits a pattern that's been building for a while now. Tokenization of real world assets, things like bonds, money market funds, equities and commodities, has gone from a niche talking point to something BlackRock, Franklin Templeton and a growing list of traditional asset managers are actively building around. Canton's pitch is that it can be the settlement layer underneath a lot of that activity, handling the messy parts around privacy and regulatory compliance that public chains generally weren't built to handle.

 

Whether Canton ends up being the dominant rail for this kind of activity, or just one of several competing standards, is still very much an open question. Other institutional focused networks and consortia are chasing similar territory, and banks have a long history of building their own private ledgers rather than relying on shared infrastructure. But with this round, Digital Asset has clearly bought itself runway, credibility, and a deep bench of new institutional relationships, which in this market counts for a lot.

 

Financial Technology Partners served as the exclusive financial advisor on the deal, according to the company's release. For now, the immediate market reaction has been modest, with CC ticking higher alongside a broader crypto rally this week, but the more interesting story here probably isn't the token price. It's the growing list of names from Citadel to ADIA who are now, at least on paper, aligned with Canton's success.