Canton Network: infrastructure for tokenization of RWA (real-world assets)
What is Canton Network?
Canton Network is an innovative enterprise blockchain infrastructure for institutional finance and the RWA (real-world assets) market.
The development of the Canton Network is led by the technology company Digital Asset, founded in 2014 in New York and known for its partnership with ASX and major banks from the traditional financial sector.
The development of the Canton Network startup took a decade, demonstrating the seriousness of Digital Asset's intention to occupy the RWA (real-world assets) niche in the DeFi (decentralized finance) market. In total, the Canton Network project raised about $450 million across several investment rounds.
Despite the fact that the Canton Network platform has existed for less than two years, the network has already reached institutional scale. According to analysts, by October 2025, Canton Network was processing over 600,000 transactions per day.
By the end of 2025, the monthly transaction volume in the Canton Network reached $4 trillion, which is a massive figure for the cryptocurrency market, while the total value of RWA assets deployed in the protocol exceeded $6 trillion. For comparison, the Ethereum network processes the same transaction volume in only over eight months.
How does Canton Network work?
At the core of Canton Network is controlled data access. One of the key components of the protocol is the Global Synchronizer — a service that controls data exchange between network participants and manages access to it.
This approach distinguishes Canton Network from traditional monolithic blockchains. Thanks to the global synchronizer, only direct participants in a communication process can exchange digital assets and data, excluding third parties.
Canton Network implements so-called sub-transactions, the data of which is disclosed only to participants of the exchange and protected by end-to-end encryption. Transaction data is recorded in multiple ledgers, enabling data access segmentation and ensuring the required level of privacy.
Thanks to its architectural features, the Canton Network protocol supports the following use cases:
- Tokenization (placement on blockchain) of traditional assets, including securities
- Atomic swaps (on-chain exchanges) of assets between organizations such as banks and stock exchanges
- Institutional payments and transfers in stablecoins backed by real currencies and traded assets.
- Trading of derivatives based on traditional assets.
- Transactions for corporate repo* deals with automated verification
* Repo — a short-term financial transaction in which one party sells securities to another with an obligation to repurchase them later at a predetermined price. Essentially, it is a form of secured lending widely used by banks and financial institutions for liquidity management.
The main participants of the Canton Network, as in traditional blockchain platforms, are validators responsible for processing and ensuring transaction confidentiality.
At launch, the Canton Network mainnet had only 27 active validators, but by the end of 2025, their number exceeded 570. Companies such as Goldman Sachs, Binance, BNP Paribas, Circle, and HSBC launched their own nodes in the network.
There are also supervalidators in the Canton Network that manage the consensus infrastructure.
Another important aspect of Canton Network is its unlimited scalability, which allows the protocol's throughput to grow indefinitely as needed.
Canton Network cryptocurrency
In June 2024, at the launch of the Canton Network mainnet, the native cryptocurrency Canton (CC) was issued, serving as the main asset and "fuel" of the ecosystem.
The main functions of the CC cryptocurrency in the Canton Network include:
- Payment of network fees. CC is used as a means of payment for transaction processing and data exchange.
- Rewards for validators and other network participants. Active participants receive a share in newly minted CC coins.
- Governance of the Canton Network fund. CC holders and supervalidators can propose and vote on ecosystem development initiatives.
A distinctive feature of the Canton Network (CC) is that it was launched with zero premine. 50% of newly generated CC coins are allocated not to early investors, as is often the case, but to application developers within the ecosystem.
As of May 2026, 38.4 billion CC are in circulation. The cryptocurrency has an unlimited supply, but developers implemented a deflationary mechanism that reduces issuance by burning fees. Each year, 2.5 billion new CC coins will be released.
The market capitalization of Canton Network is $5.78 billion, placing CC among the top 20 digital assets. The current price of CC is $0.15.
Since listing, CC has increased by only 4.2% due to a correction that lasted through the last quarter of 2024. The all-time high of Canton Network was recorded in February 2026.
Since reaching its peak, CC has lost only 23% of its value, significantly less compared to many other digital assets — including Bitcoin, which has dropped more than 37% from its latest all-time high.
Conclusion
The Canton Network team has already built an institutional-grade blockchain, âîñòðåáîâàííûé (in demand) among major banks and payment organizations. By the end of 2025, the ecosystem included more than 400 major participants using the protocol.
Among Canton Network users are major players such as Bank of America, Tradeweb, and Circle. Given the growing RWA (real-world assets) market, Canton Network has strong potential to become a leader in its segment.