Canton Network's $355M round has a16z, ADIA, and half of Wall Street writing checks

Digital Asset, the developer behind the Canton Network, has closed a $355 million funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz's crypto arm, a16z crypto, with participation from the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority through a wholly owned subsidiary, according to a Thursday announcement. The round values Digital Asset at around $2 billion, per a Bloomberg Law report cited by Cointelegraph that referenced people familiar with the matter. a16z crypto contributed $100 million, alongside 7RIDGE, Citadel Securities and Optiver.

Other participants included William Blair, Hanwha Investment & Securities, BNP Paribas, HSBC, ABN Amro, CME Ventures, S&P Global and Coinbase Ventures, spanning investment banks and financial services firms from South Korea to the Netherlands. Citadel Securities, Optiver, Tradeweb, DRW Venture Capital, IMC, Goldman Sachs and Virtu were also among backers across prior and current rounds. In June 2025, Digital Asset secured $135 million from DRW Venture Capital, Tradeweb, Citadel Securities, IMC, Optiver, Goldman Sachs, Virtu and others, followed by a $50 million strategic round in December from BNY Mellon, Nasdaq, S&P Global and iCapital, and more than $120 million raised in 2021 from investors including 7RIDGE and Eldridge, following earlier investments from JPMorgan, Citi, Deutsche Börse, Goldman Sachs, IBM, Samsung and Salesforce.

Canton is a public, permissioned blockchain designed for financial institutions to tokenize and settle traditional securities such as bonds, equities and commodities while keeping commercially sensitive data private. The network has been piloted by institutions including Goldman Sachs, BNY Mellon, BNP Paribas, Standard Chartered, Société Générale and Deutsche Börse. Digital Asset co-founder and CEO Yuval Rooz told Cointelegraph that the company can now "accelerate strategic partnerships and help major financial institutions move mission-critical infrastructure onchain faster," adding that Canton was designed for regulated finance from day one and that no third party can change an issuer's books and records without its consent, which is "essential if capital markets infrastructures are going to put their systems onchain."

In a separate statement, Rooz said that "blockchain adoption will be defined by practical, production-grade applications in the world's largest markets" and that "for capital markets to move on-chain, institutions need infrastructure that reflects how they actually operate." Since its debut nearly two years ago, Canton has gained more than 700 ecosystem participants, according to Rooz. The network's "network of networks" architecture allows participants to retain complete control over systems connected to a broader ecosystem, a design that has drawn criticism from blockchain purists, with TD analyst Lance Vits calling it "a glorified database in the cloud and not at all consistent with Bitcoin's open architecture that is both trustless and permissionless."

Canton's native token changed hands around 16 cents, a 12.3% increase over the past week, according to CoinGecko. The digital asset reached an all-time high of 19 cents in February. Bloomberg reported last month that Digital Asset had initially been seeking roughly $300 million at that valuation and expected to close the financing within weeks.