Digital Asset has raised $135 million in a strategic funding round led by DRW Venture Capital and Tradeweb Markets, with a range of other banks and market infrastructure providers also participating.
Yuval Rooz
The fintech said the funding will accelerate institutional and decentralised finance adoption on the Canton Network, the public permissionless Layer-1 blockchain that offers configurable privacy and institutional-grade compliance at scale.
The network launched two years ago with the support of the likes of BNP Paribas, Cboe, Deutsche Börse Group and Goldman Sachs.
BNP Paribas and Goldman Sachs were also among those backing Digital Asset in the latest funding round, alongside Citadel Securities, Optiver, and Virtu Financial.
Digital Asset said the capital will expand the integration of hundreds of billions of real-world assets (RWAs) onto Canton, building upon its deployment of diverse asset classes, including bonds, money market funds, alternative funds, commodities, repurchase agreements (repos), mortgages, life insurance, and annuities.
The raise also deepens the relationship with several firms already part of the Canton Network and its Global Synchronizer Foundation, including, BNP Paribas, DRW, Goldman Sachs, Liberty City Ventures, QCP, and Tradeweb, all of whom have played various roles in either the testing, governance, infrastructure, or app development on the Network since its inception.
Canton has experienced rapid growth over the past year, with nearly 400 ecosystem participants on the network.
“This funding milestone validates the inevitability of what we envisioned years ago: a privacy-enabled public blockchain designed specifically for institutional adoption,” said Yuval Rooz, founder and chief executive of Digital Asset.
“Canton is already actively supporting numerous asset classes–from bonds to alternative funds–and this raise will accelerate onboarding even more real-world assets, finally making blockchain’s transformative promise an institutional-scale reality.”