Did Wall Street secretly adopt a "fake" blockchain? The truth behind the 8 trillion yuan monthly buyback data

Have you noticed that recently Wall Street's debt holders—JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, Franklin D. Roosevelt—suddenly collectively joined a blockchain network called Canton.

These institutions usually hate revealing their cards to outsiders, but Canton handles up to $8 trillion in repurchase transactions every month, and Broadridge's DLR platform even accounts for 3% of the U.S. repurchase market share.

Even more bizarre, the Canton token $CC has surged to a market cap of $6 billion. But the crypto community feels increasingly uncomfortable—this doesn’t look like a blockchain at all.

It doesn’t make all transactions public, doesn’t allow everyone to verify, and doesn’t even share global state. Can it really be called a blockchain?

Alright, today let’s cut to the chase and get to the core of this matter.

Canton isn’t an “privacy version” of Ethereum or Solana. It’s a different species: a selectively disclosed institutional synchronization network.

In Canton, each participant only sees the contract details relevant to them. The global synchronizer only orders messages and confirms results, without reading transaction details at all.

This approach drives crypto purists crazy: if you don’t even allow permissionless validation, what’s the point of calling it a public chain?

But Wall Street’s answer is simple: we’re not after censorship resistance; we want settlement certainty.

The repurchase market has an exposure of $12.6 trillion daily, and a failed settlement can cost millions of dollars in fines per day. The DLR system fixes collateral, settles off-chain in cash, and automatically reverses at maturity, handling the entire process atomically to reduce failure rates to zero.

JPMorgan’s own deposit token JPMD has processed $430 billion in repurchase settlements, saving Siemens $20 million annually in idle capital costs. Settlement time has been reduced from T+1 to same-day.

You can’t ignore these numbers.

So here’s the question: is Canton truly a tokenized system?

According to Ethereum standards, a token is a freely transferable bearer asset. Built on-chain, any address can hold it, and liquidity can be combined.

But assets on Canton are more like “programmable rights records.” Government bonds are held in custody accounts, with ownership represented on-chain, and transfers are controlled through signatures, observers, and controllers in Daml contracts.

You can’t take it to a decentralized exchange to provide liquidity, nor can you split out yield shares.

So the crypto community calls it “pseudo-tokenization,” but Wall Street sees this as the necessary path to compliance.

Which mindset is right?

Don’t rush to pick a side. The market’s signals are smarter—institutions won’t follow a single path.

One route is “capturing on-chain liquidity”: hundreds of billions in stablecoins, government bonds, and DeFi funds on public chains, with asset management firms issuing tokenized products directly accessing this buyer channel. BUIDL, BENJI, USTB are typical examples—they seek open market distribution capabilities.

The other route is “optimizing institutional workflows”: repurchase agreements, collateral management, cross-border settlements—mainly involving a few big banks, where privacy and speed are paramount. Canton fits perfectly into this niche.

Two needs, two infrastructures—neither can swallow the other.

So don’t measure Canton by the standards of public chains. Its core metrics aren’t TVL or address count, but throughput, settlement speed, failure rate reduction, and operational cost savings.

Retail investors should be most concerned about: when DTCC (which manages over $100 trillion in assets) announces tokenization of government bonds on Canton, the asset pools accessible through this chain will expand exponentially.

Canton’s moat isn’t in open-source code but in the contracts already signed and the workflows in operation. If you want to copy it, first convince JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs to overhaul their backend systems.

Finally, remember: Canton and Ethereum aren’t competitors; they serve two completely different tables. Recognizing the boundaries of each is much more useful than debating who’s more “orthodox.”