Exclusive Interview with Canton Network: Enabling the Market Itself to Go On-Chain, Quietly Becoming Wall Street's New Underlying Layer

Original | Odaily Planet Daily (@OdailyChina)

Author | jk

1. A proposal approved in just three days

On March 20, 2026, the globally renowned payment service provider, also the company represented by the symbol found on most bank cards—Visa—submitted a governance proposal to Canton Network. According to The Block, just three days later, the proposal was approved, and Visa officially became a Super Validator on Canton with the highest weight level 10 (Super Validator Weight 10). This was also Visa’s first-ever submission of a blockchain governance proposal.

In the crypto world, this might seem like another move by traditional finance to enter the space. But if you understand the internal legal and compliance processes of institutions like Visa, you’ll realize that a three-day approval is quite unusual. Visa’s compliance team must have submitted this document with the utmost caution and seriousness typical of traditional finance, and receiving the highest weight indicates that negotiations and due diligence had already been fully completed beforehand. The public-facing proposal is likely the result of months of close cooperation between traditional finance and the crypto world.

Visa’s Global Head of Growth Products and Strategic Partnerships, Rubail Birwadker, stated: “Many banks believe that the biggest obstacle to migrating substantial business onto the chain is the lack of privacy. By serving as a Super Validator for Canton Network, we bring Visa-level trust, governance, and operational standards into this privacy-preserving blockchain infrastructure, allowing regulated financial institutions to move their payment operations onto the chain without disrupting existing workflows.”

It’s clear that Visa’s involvement signifies recognition of an already mature network of institutions, not the starting point.

Since 2017, every market cycle has seen a batch of traditional financial institutions loudly declare “exploring blockchain,” but very few have successfully turned these explorations into real business. This time, Visa is entering at the governance layer, holding voting rights and participating in infrastructure decision-making. Eric Saraniecki, Network Strategy Lead at Digital Asset, co-founder of Canton Network, said in a statement: “Visa’s participation confirms that this technology has moved from the experimental stage into production readiness.”

Curious about this partnership, Odaily Planet Daily interviewed the Canton Network team. What exactly facilitated this cooperation? And what made Canton, a long-sleeping project, chosen?

2. Not more assets on chain, but the market itself on chain

To understand why Canton can attract Visa, we first need to look at the core differences between Canton and other blockchains.

Ethereum and Solana address the question: How to get more people involved, how to bring more assets onto the chain. Canton’s focus is: How can financial institutions conduct normal business on the chain? While the emphasis seems different, the specific design choices make their trade-offs almost opposite at every turn.

Ethereum’s global transparency is an advantage for retail users but a barrier for institutions. For example, a bank’s foreign exchange trading desk, if every USD and EUR trade is visible in real-time, counterparties can immediately adjust their quotes based on this information, significantly increasing trading costs. If market makers’ positions and hedging activities are fully public, competitors can mirror these actions and squeeze profit margins. Repos between institutions involve their capital positions and collateral scales; if these data leak, it poses liquidity management risks. These restrictions are not directly related to regulation but are dictated by basic business logic.

Even if addresses and real-world identities are unlinked, transparent on-chain transactions will alter the entire secondary market logic. No traditional financial institution wants its trades to be sniped, so designs like Ethereum and Hyperliquid are not optimal for large institutions.

Canton’s approach incorporates data visibility control.

This method embeds selective data disclosure into the protocol layer itself, as a native design of L1, rather than relying on application-layer patches. Specifically, only the direct participants in a transaction can see the details; the network verifies without exposing any sensitive data. Two banks can perform cross-border settlement on the same shared infrastructure, with the transaction completely invisible to outsiders. Competitors can interact on the same network, with their positions and strategies remaining confidential.

We also asked about technical details. Canton explained: “Canton separates the coordination layer (shared across the network) from data visibility (restricted to participants), achieved through isolated execution environments and selective synchronization. This allows institutions to trade securely, interact with competitors, and keep their positions or strategies private. It’s a mechanism that enables a true market—rather than assets—to operate natively on-chain.”

Canton Network summarized this design philosophy: Data visibility control is fundamental, not an add-on feature.

Hence, why does Canton’s validator list look like a gathering of old-money giants: Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, BNP Paribas, Citibank, Bank of America, DTCC, Nasdaq, Broadridge, Tradeweb… These institutions are coming in because this infrastructure allows them to replicate traditional financial success on top of it, gradually bringing liquidity.

Canton’s Super Validators

3. Wall Street roots, meticulous craftsmanship

Canton was created by Digital Asset Holdings, founded in 2014 by Blythe Masters. Blythe Masters, once a star executive at JPMorgan Chase, was a pioneer in the CDS (credit default swap) field and has deep connections and industry backing on Wall Street. From day one, this company has not aimed at retail blockchain products but targets financial institutions with real balance sheets, strict regulation, and operational needs within legal frameworks.

Regarding background, we asked a pointed question: Given that Canton was launched in 2023, why did it only go fully live this year?

Canton’s answer: slow and meticulous.

Wall Street’s influence shapes the project’s pace. Canton openly admits in interviews that this chain took longer to reach today’s stage compared to other L1s because from the start, it has been dealing with regulated financial systems, building institutional trust, and integrating with real-world markets.

This pace is the opposite of the mainstream Web3 narrative. Most public chains pursue rapid deployment, ecosystem expansion, and hype generation—launching TGE (Token Generation Events) with little clarity on future plans. Canton’s approach is to negotiate step-by-step: first securing DTCC, then Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Visa—using their endorsements to bring in actual business.

2026 marks a turning point, not because of marketing or the crypto bear market reshuffling, but because the infrastructure finally meets institutional standards: real balance sheet activity is running on it. That’s why now is the best time to pay attention to Canton Network.

“So, how much business has been introduced?” we continued to ask.

4. Canton’s on-chain activities

Canton’s current data footprint is an outlier in the blockchain industry, with properties very different from most public chains. Currently, Canton Network handles over $9 trillion USD monthly, with hundreds of thousands of daily transactions, and has seen a multi-year growth in ecosystem participants. These figures correspond to real financial operations: tokenized repos, government bond settlements, cross-institution collateral movements. These are not mere volume metrics but actual activities on institutional balance sheets.

We also asked about the main products on the chain. The current flagship examples include:

JPM Coin from JPMorgan Chase: In January 2026, JPMorgan’s Kinexys division announced the native deployment of JPM Coin on Canton Network. Unlike USDT or USDC, JPM Coin is a deposit token representing a direct claim on JPMorgan’s deposits, operating within existing banking regulation. For example, two institutions settling cross-border transactions with JPM Coin on Canton is essentially no different from traditional settlement, just much faster and not limited to business hours. Kinexys’ average daily transaction volume is between $2-3 billion, with a total exceeding $1.5 trillion since 2019, now flowing on Canton.

DTCC’s US Treasury Tokenization: In December 2025, DTCC announced a partnership with Digital Asset to tokenize some of its US Treasury holdings on Canton, aiming to launch a controlled production environment in the first half of 2026, then expand based on market demand. DTCC also co-chairs the Canton Foundation with Euroclear, directly participating in governance.

DTCC handles over $20 trillion in securities transactions annually, acting as the core of the US capital market’s clearing and settlement system. Analogously, DTCC’s role in traditional finance is similar to the People’s Bank of China; it doesn’t hold deposits but processes all stock and bond transactions behind the scenes. The repo market, which traditionally operates only on weekdays, would be limited to business hours. But on Canton, repo transactions can run 24/7, using on-chain US Treasuries as collateral, enabling real-time, cross-institutional, cross-timezone liquidity, even over weekends.

What will Visa do on Canton?

Canton describes a core goal as atomic settlement: buyer payment and seller asset delivery happen simultaneously in one operation, without two-step processes or reliance on intermediaries. For example, currently, when an institution buys bonds, the transfer of assets and cash settlement are separate steps, with time gaps, counterparty risk, and manual reconciliation. Canton aims to make these happen at the same time, instantaneously, with no time lag. Achieving this requires both capital markets infrastructure and payment infrastructure to be on-chain. Canton already has a solid foundation in capital markets; Visa’s involvement provides a real institutional anchor for the payment side.

Beyond that, real-time cross-border capital flows and embedding programmable logic into financial transactions are also on the agenda.

Canton believes 2026 will be the first period where infrastructure truly meets institutional demands, which is why institutions like Visa are engaging now.

Existing Use Cases

Tokenized repos are currently the most mature scenario. Repos are short-term financing tools among financial institutions—selling bonds with an agreement to repurchase after a few days. Traditionally, this process is limited to business hours and involves settlement delays. Tokenized repos on Canton are already enabling 24/7, instant settlement, with leading institutions completing cross-institutional, weekend-covering repos.

Collateral mobilization is another practical scenario. Large institutions often need to move collateral between accounts or entities—for example, transferring bonds from A to B to meet margin requirements for derivatives. Traditionally, this takes days, assets are locked, and cannot be used elsewhere. Canton’s settlement model makes this process nearly real-time.

Digital bond issuance is another area where Canton excels. The team states that it currently accounts for over half of the global digital bond issuance market. Canton offers complete delivery-versus-payment (DvP), full lifecycle management, and multi-party coordination, enabling bonds to be issued and settled entirely on-chain, not just tokenized assets with off-chain processes.

Stablecoin settlement is a direction accelerated by Visa’s involvement. The goal is to enable institutional stablecoin payments on a compliant infrastructure with data visibility controls, rather than routing through public chains.

In simple terms, while RWA (Real-World Assets) are not explicitly mentioned, every statement emphasizes the demand for RWA.

Canton’s roadmap also indicates: In the medium term, corporate bonds, private credit, and trade finance will follow; in the longer term, equities are also on this path. The logic from current use cases to this roadmap is consistent: assets with higher liquidity and more mature regulation will be adopted earlier.

5. What does the CC token represent?

For broader market participants, the question of what the CC token actually is remains unavoidable.

Canton’s straightforward explanation from the interview: CC is a “network utility asset,” its value anchored to the volume of real financial activity occurring on the network.

This means demand comes from actual usage— the more institutions trade on Canton, the more CC is consumed. Long-term drivers include institutional trading volume, stablecoin settlement scale, total on-chain assets, and the depth of interoperability between Canton and other networks.

CC’s token distribution is quite rare in Web3: no pre-mining, no team allocation, no VC shares—all tokens are distributed fairly through open market mechanisms. For institutional participants, this reduces concerns about “someone holding ultra-low-cost tokens and cashing out on the secondary market at any time.” The rules are transparent and equitable for all.

For ordinary market participants, Canton functions more as a backend infrastructure. Most users will interact via exchanges, wallets, or financial platforms rather than directly with the protocol. The improvements—faster settlement, tighter bid-ask spreads, better financial products—will gradually reach end users through product layers, not through direct protocol interaction.

6. Next steps

Canton’s stated 3-5 year goals are not measured by on-chain TVL or token price. Based on their outlined objectives: stablecoins becoming the standard for institutional settlement, similar to SWIFT for wire transfers; major financial activities like bank loans, deposits, bond issuance, and product structuring operating directly on-chain; cross-border capital flows happening nearly in real-time; multiple asset classes being issued and settled natively on Canton, rather than off-chain with manual data sync.

Canton describes this future state as “invisible”: at that point, Canton would be just one of the underlying protocols quietly powering global finance—like TCP/IP for the internet or SWIFT for cross-border payments—used without users necessarily noticing its presence, but essential for everything to function.

Of course, this path is long. Regulatory fragmentation across jurisdictions, differing compliance standards in Europe versus Asia, legacy system integration challenges, and the interoperability between different blockchains are all significant hurdles. Institutional coordination on a shared infrastructure involves complex interests. The Canton team acknowledges these issues, emphasizing: “Technical bottlenecks are no longer the biggest challenge; the real challenge is how to truly scale globally.”

It’s clear that financial infrastructure transformation is never a sudden event. SWIFT was established in 1973 and took nearly two decades to become the standard for cross-border settlement. Today, we use it without thinking about its origins. Canton is currently at a similar “unknown potential” stage—no one yet realizes what it might become. But for something aiming to be foundational infrastructure, being overlooked might just be a sign of success.