Digital Asset, a blockchain technology company pioneering privacy-enabled financial infrastructure, has secured $135m in a strategic funding round aimed at accelerating the adoption of its Canton Network.
The round was led by DRW Venture Capital and Tradeweb Markets, with participation from a wide range of traditional and digital asset-native institutions including BNP Paribas, Circle Ventures, Citadel Securities, DTCC, Goldman Sachs, IMC, Liberty City Ventures, Optiver, Paxos, Polychain Capital, QCP, Republic Digital, 7RIDGE, and Virtu Financial.
Founded in 2014, Digital Asset develops blockchain solutions that bring institutional-grade privacy and compliance to digital and traditional markets. The company is best known for building the Canton Network, a public, permissionless Layer-1 blockchain that supports real-world assets with configurable privacy and interoperability features.
The newly raised capital will be used to expand the Canton Network’s capabilities, onboarding hundreds of billions of dollars in real-world assets. These include a diverse range of financial instruments such as bonds, money market funds, alternative funds, commodities, repos, mortgages, life insurance and annuities.
Several of the investors have long-standing relationships with Digital Asset and are already involved in the Canton Network or its Global Synchronizer Foundation. These include BNP Paribas, DRW, Goldman Sachs, Liberty City Ventures, QCP, and Tradeweb. Their involvement spans governance, infrastructure, and decentralised app development, supporting the network’s rapid growth. Canton now boasts nearly 400 ecosystem participants, bridging the gap between traditional finance and decentralised innovation.
Digital Asset CEO and co-founder Yuval Rooz said, “This funding milestone validates the inevitability of what we envisioned years ago: a privacy-enabled public blockchain designed specifically for institutional adoption. 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.”
DRW founder and CEO Don Wilson added, “Today, major players from crypto and traditional finance have joined Digital Asset on its mission to catalyze the next evolution in markets. Building on the work that we started a decade ago, we are at the inflection point of being able to use blockchain at scale in traditional markets. With trillions of dollars’ worth of real-world assets already leveraging the Canton Blockchain, this next round of funding creates significant momentum for the company, and cements Canton as the de facto protocol for global collateral mobility.”
