The Final Battle of Traditional Finance on the Chain: How did Canton win the favor of the London Stock Exchange and the family office of BlackRock's president?

The narrative of traditional finance going on-chain has been hyped countless times, but in reality, it has been stalled due to factors such as public chains being unable to meet Compliance requirements. However, the Canton Network has already completed interbank pilot transactions between Goldman Sachs, BNY Mellon, and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, with a daily volume exceeding 600,000 transactions. Its investment lineup is impressive, including the family office of BlackRock's president, JPMorgan, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, the London Stock Exchange, Citigroup, YZi Labs, and a number of high-frequency traders in Chicago.

Digital Asset raises 390 million USD in Series A funding, with investors including BlackRock's president's family office.

The development company of Canton Network, Digital Asset, has gone through eight rounds of financing, with disclosed financing amounts reaching as high as $390 million.

In January 2016, the Series A financing lineup included JPMorgan, Citi Ventures under Citibank, CME Ventures under the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, and France's largest financial institution BNP Paribas, among others. A month later, institutions such as Goldman Sachs and IBM also participated. A year later, it was announced that the Series B round was solely completed by Jefferson River Capital, the family office of BlackRock's president, raising $40 million. Between 2019 and 2022, Digital Asset completed four rounds of financing, which included well-known companies such as Samsung Venture and SBI Holdings.

In June this year, completed a financing of 135 million USD, led by Tradeweb Markets, a subsidiary of the London Stock Exchange, and a fund under high-frequency trader DRW, with other participants including YZi Labs, Paxos, Liberty City Ventures, Polychain, Republic Capital, Circle Ventures, QCP Capital, Citadel Securities, the US depository trust and clearing company DTCC, and market maker IMC Trading.

Digital Asset founder and CEO Yuval Rooz previously worked at high-frequency trading firms Citadel and DRW Trading, and also participated in DRW Venture Capital. After the funding round in June this year, Yuval Rooz stated: “This funding milestone validates the inevitability we envisioned years ago: a privacy-focused public chain designed specifically for institutional adoption. Canton has actively supported numerous asset classes: from bonds to alternative funds, and this funding will accelerate the introduction of more real-world assets.”

Goldman Sachs, BNY Mellon, and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange have completed cross-bank pilot transactions in Canton.

Canton is a public chain specifically designed to connect TradFi and blockchain. Although this is not a new narrative, its Chicago financial institution background adds feasibility. In the past, public chains and DeFi have faced a core contradiction: decentralization demands transparency, while financial markets require privacy and Compliance. This makes it difficult for large financial institutions to truly go on-chain and hinders the deep integration of traditional capital markets with on-chain assets.

The core concept is to incorporate controllable privacy and financial-grade governance into the openness of public chains. This allows traditional financial institutions, exchanges, asset custodians, and DeFi applications to operate on shared infrastructure while maintaining transaction confidentiality and compliance requirements. The issue with traditional public chains like Ethereum is their difficulty in meeting institutional compliance requirements and transaction congestion. Building a dedicated Layer 2 requires bridging, which introduces additional trust and security risks.

Canton adopts a “Network of Networks” design, where each institution can maintain its own sub-ledger (Sub-ledger). Each financial institution operates its own validation nodes, and only the parties involved in the transaction will synchronize and verify the data. Each participant only holds the transaction fragments they are supposed to see, forming a verifiable but non-disclosing privacy model.

Last September, Goldman Sachs, BNY Mellon, and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange completed interbank pilot transactions on Canton. This October, Canton has handled a daily transaction volume exceeding 600,000.

This article Traditional Finance on-chain final battle: How does Canton win the favor of the London Stock Exchange and the family office of BlackRock's president? First appeared in Chain News ABMedia.