Canton Super $500 Million DAT Launch: The Foundation's Sole Support, RWA Scale Breaks $6 Trillion

Author: J.A.E, PANews

After a disappointing “Uptober,” investors are trembling in “Red November.” The once-hot DAT narrative has now begun to fade, with the two largest ETH treasury companies, BitMNR and SharpLink, holding positions with a combined unrealized loss of over $1.9 billion. However, Nasdaq-listed Tharimmune announced on November 3rd the establishment of the Canton Coin treasury and completed a $540 million private placement, led by DRW and Liberty City Ventures, with participation from institutions like ARK Invest. Amid the DAT downturn, this contrarian financing may not only be capital injection but also another bet by traditional financial institutions on blockchain.

Tokenized assets exceed $6 trillion, and Canton aims to build the first ALLFi public blockchain

The underlying infrastructure of traditional capital markets is undergoing a quiet transformation driven by a few leading institutions. Led by Digital Asset, the blockchain network Canton Network has gradually become Wall Street’s primary blockchain platform. It has established a thriving ecosystem spanning banks, custodians, exchanges, and market makers, actively promoting the large-scale on-chain integration of traditional financial assets.

Canton is committed to becoming the first public chain to pioneer the “AllFi” paradigm, focusing on integrating DeFi and traditional finance advantages, enabling crypto-native developers and institutions to achieve blockchain efficiency and traditional financial compliance without being “one-size-fits-all.”

The most direct measure of infrastructure is the scale of assets processed and transaction speed. Canton has moved beyond the proof-of-concept stage into large-scale expansion. Official sources reveal that Canton currently supports over $6 trillion in on-chain assets, with an average of 800,000 transactions per day. This volume indicates that Canton is penetrating high-value traditional financial markets, with institutional-level transaction speed and liquidity.

The list of investors and participants in Canton resembles a boardroom of Wall Street rather than a typical crypto startup, including major traditional financial giants and core crypto industry players. The collective endorsement and deep involvement of these top institutions may imply they are betting on Canton becoming the next-generation global financial infrastructure.

Canton’s positioning is as the only public chain in finance with on-chain privacy features. Its advantage lies in solving the privacy and compliance challenges that traditional enterprise distributed ledger technology (DLT) has struggled with, which is crucial for the flow of traditional capital on decentralized networks.

Traditional public chains often adopt a “global replication” model, where all users can view all on-chain transactions. While this transparency and security foundation suits retail markets and permissionless DeFi, it creates compliance and business barriers for tightly regulated, highly competitive traditional financial markets.

For large financial institutions, the lack of privacy attributes in public chains presents three main pain points, which turn “full transparency” into a structural flaw:

1. Business Confidentiality Risks: On-chain recording of business data (client info and proprietary trading strategies) can be captured or maliciously attacked by competitors through on-chain analysis or reverse engineering, risking exposure of trade secrets;
2. Legal Risks: Jurisdictions like GDPR grant users the right to delete their data. Immutable records on public chains may conflict with such legal requirements;
3. Reputational and Compliance Risks: Public historical records mean any transaction details could be scrutinized, increasing the risk of scandals or regulatory penalties.

To meet strict privacy and compliance requirements while maintaining interoperability and scalability, Canton employs three core components: Daml smart contracts, PoSH (Stakeholder Proof of Stake) consensus mechanism, and synchronization domain protocol.

First, Canton’s underlying framework is Daml smart contracts, designed specifically for multi-party participation to ensure privacy and data consistency.

Daml’s key feature is support for “sub-transaction privacy.” This means that in a multi-party transaction, each participant can only see transaction records relevant to them. For example, in asset settlement, the buyer, seller, custodian, and bank only receive and record information pertinent to their respective activities.

Daml can define which parties are authorized to view and modify any given contract, based on a data minimization principle, creating a “Need-to-Know” mechanism that directly addresses GDPR compliance challenges faced by institutions.

Second, Canton’s consensus mechanism is PoSH, differing from traditional PoW or PoS “global replication” models.

In PoSH, only the validators involved in a specific transaction—i.e., the relevant stakeholders—are authorized to verify it. Through privacy configurations, the protocol ensures that validators can only see data relevant to their users, without access to other information.

This mechanism separates validator responsibilities from data exposure risks, ensuring distributed verification and integrity while maintaining transaction confidentiality.

Finally, the synchronization domain architecture provides horizontal scalability, with theoretically unlimited TPS (transactions per second).

The trust model of synchronization domains is highly flexible, allowing Canton to maintain interoperability while meeting institutional preferences for security and efficiency. Importantly, all transaction data transmitted between nodes is end-to-end encrypted and only selectively shared under the “Need-to-Know” mechanism. Therefore, the synchronization domain itself cannot access transaction content, safeguarding privacy. Even in the presence of malicious participants, Canton can ensure ledger integrity across nodes.

In summary, Canton’s comprehensive architecture directly addresses the pain points of on-chain traditional financial assets, achieving institutional-grade privacy and compliance.

Deeply aligned with traditional financial giants, focusing on RWA (Real-World Assets) and all-weather financing capabilities

Canton’s practical utility and market adoption are already demonstrated through a series of high-value institutional use cases.

The Canton ecosystem involves banks, infrastructure providers, liquidity providers, and other roles.

In a pilot project, Canton partnered with 45 top financial institutions, asset managers, and service providers to pioneer large-scale atomic transactions. This pilot proved that traditional, independent financial systems could connect and synchronize via Canton while maintaining privacy controls.

Thus, Canton’s development relies heavily on deep participation from financial giants, who are not only users but also co-builders and investors of the infrastructure.

Canton’s decentralization mainly manifests in its validator structure, currently with nearly 600 active validators, balancing governance and performance. Super validators like Hypernative provide real-time transaction security and risk management, which is critical for a network handling trillions in assets.

On the asset side, Canton emphasizes efficient trading of RWA, especially high-liquidity assets such as tokenized US Treasuries.

A breakthrough transaction led by an industry working group exemplifies this. Participants including Bank of America, Société Générale, Castle Securities, and Circle jointly completed an unconventional US Treasury financing transaction on Canton. This significant progress unlocked 24/7 financing capabilities, overcoming traditional market time restrictions and settlement mechanisms.

Currently, the daily repurchase trading volume of US Treasuries on Canton exceeds $280 billion, indicating Canton’s potential to become a key liquidity infrastructure for traditional markets. This scale affirms Canton’s “AllFi” positioning, integrating tokenized assets and privacy-protected payment settlement into institutional workflows.

Launching a treasury strategy exceeding $500 million, becoming the only Nasdaq-listed company supported by the foundation

On November 3rd, Nasdaq-listed Tharimmune announced the completion of a $540 million private placement to establish the CC treasury, which may serve as a super validator and develop related DApps to support overall network utility. Tharimmune is also the only listed company supported by the Canton Foundation.

This strategic move carries profound institutional significance:

1. Regulatory Access: The DAT model provides traditional institutions with a compliant way to invest in CC via the US stock market, offering indirect exposure for those restricted by strict regulations from directly holding crypto assets;
2. Capital Acceleration: Led by DRW and Liberty City Ventures, most funds are invested in CC, with external supporters contributing an additional $100–$200 million. This not only provides a strong capital foundation for Canton’s development but also aligns protocol tokenomics with the network effect of $6 trillion in assets;
3. Network Maturity: The advancement of DAT may coincide with large-scale institutional adoption of Canton, translating protocol utility into tradable financial products integrated into traditional capital markets.

Canton Coin (CC) is the native token of Canton, with an “Minting-Burning” economic model directly linked to network utility and economic incentives. DApp developers and validators, among other on-chain participants, earn CC by providing utility to the network.

The CC tokenomics are based on:

1. Utility-Driven Issuance: Every circulating CC is generated by participants offering practical utility to the network;
2. No Staking Requirement: Unlike many PoS chains, running a validator node on Canton does not require staking, reducing institutional concerns over capital lock-up.

For Canton, the DAT strategy packages protocol token investments into regulated financial instruments, significantly easing institutional concerns about crypto volatility or complex regulations. It also lays the groundwork for synchronized growth of traditional capital and network incentives. Additionally, CC incorporates a nested value accumulation model, with the burn/mint ratio steadily increasing to 0.24.

As tokenized assets like US Treasuries continue to be integrated on-chain, Canton may gradually become the “On-Chain Wall Street” hub. However, whether it can truly bridge the last mile between traditional finance and crypto markets depends heavily on regulatory adaptation. Despite its powerful privacy features, uncertainties remain, such as SEC scrutiny of tokenized assets or the EU’s stance on GDPR compatibility with blockchain.

Critics argue that while PoSH is privacy-friendly, it may reduce overall transparency and increase money laundering risks. Moreover, the burn mechanism of CC relies on real activity; if adoption slows, it could impact deflationary effects.