The real choice of Wall Street institutions, uncovering the secrets behind Canton Network's $4 trillion monthly transactions

Author: momo, ChainCathcer

As the market's attention focuses on general-purpose public chains, Canton Network has quietly become one of Wall Street's core institutional blockchain platforms. It has not only been adopted by large financial institutions but has also established a vast financial alliance, promoting the on-chain transformation of global traditional financial assets.

Recently, following Goldman Sachs and Moody's, HSBC and BNP Paribas also announced their participation in Canton Network. Additionally, several large financial institutions, including Bank of New York Mellon, DTCC, Tradeweb, Bank of America, Citadel Securities, Hong Kong Stock Exchange (Synapse), and First Abu Dhabi Bank in the UAE, have participated in and adopted Canton Network, empowering its governance, infrastructure development, and application development.

According to Canton Network, it currently has over 400 ecological projects and processes more than $4 trillion in RWA assets each month. The latest report from RedStone states that since 2022, more than half of digital bond issuances have been completed through Canton.

The capital markets have also shown strong interest. In June of this year, Canton Network developer Digital Asset announced the completion of a $135 million strategic financing round, with participation from well-known companies in traditional finance and crypto, including DRW Venture Capital, Tradeweb Markets, BNP Paribas, Circle Ventures, Citadel Securities, DTCC, Virtu Financial, and Paxos. Just a month later, YZi Labs announced an investment in Digital Asset.

Why have Wall Street institutions collectively chosen Canton Network? What are its characteristics? How great is its potential for future growth?

The Global Trend of Tokenization: From Concept to Practice

The rise of Canton Network is not accidental; it aligns with the inevitable trend of global asset tokenization. The Boston Consulting Group (BCG) predicted in a 2022 report that by 2030, the market size of tokenized assets will reach $16 trillion, equivalent to 60% of today's U.S. GDP.

For traditional financial giants, the appeal of tokenization lies in the dual advantages of efficiency and regulation. The issuance and settlement of traditional bonds often take days or even longer, while on-chain issuance processes can compress this time to just a few minutes. Repurchase agreements, which previously relied on clearinghouses and intermediaries, can now achieve real-time settlement through smart contracts.

Since 2022, Canton has accounted for over 57.5% (approximately $4.6 billion) of the global digital bond issuance volume, and in 2024 alone, five transactions totaling over $1.1 billion in digital bonds will be completed through Canton-related platforms.

In 2023, the Hong Kong Stock Exchange (HKEX) launched the HKEX Synapse trading settlement acceleration platform, which uses Canton Network as the underlying blockchain to achieve T+0 on-chain settlement for Hong Kong Stock Connect (Shanghai-Hong Kong Stock Connect, Shenzhen-Hong Kong Stock Connect), enabling cross-border securities and information synchronization for domestic and foreign investors.

By Q4 2024, Canton, in collaboration with Euroclear (Europe's largest clearing institution), the World Gold Council, Clifford Chance, and others, piloted the on-chain issuance and custody of assets such as gold, euro bonds, and UK government bonds in digital form, completing over 500 real-time "atomic settlements" and exploring new models for cross-border collateralization and settlement.

In August 2025, Tradeweb and Bank of New York Mellon also jointly conducted on-chain transactions for U.S. Treasury repurchase agreements on Canton, achieving an average daily trading volume of $10 billion and enabling "24/7 settlement/financing." This practical operation fully validates the efficiency and reliability of blockchain and demonstrates the potential for "around-the-clock operation" in future financial markets.

Meanwhile, the European asset tokenization company Black Manta recently successfully issued a €150 million real estate portfolio bond on the Canton network, attracting institutional investors including Deutsche Bank.

On the compliance front, increasingly stringent regulatory requirements make infrastructure that can simultaneously meet the legal frameworks of the U.S., Europe, and Asia particularly valuable. Canton possesses this advantage; it is neither an experimental pilot project nor an untested technological prototype, but a fully operational financial business system.

Rejecting Disruption, Choosing Upgrade

In recent years, the narrative around public chains has primarily focused on retail users, while traditional financial institutions, which hold the vast majority of global assets, have long struggled in the processes of digitization and tokenization. Their biggest challenge lies in balancing privacy and transparency, as well as achieving interoperability while maintaining system independence.

Recognizing the transformation pain points of large financial institutions, Canton has not participated in the "faster public chain" or "cheaper transactions" technology race but has instead focused on the overlooked institutional market. For Wall Street, they do not need a complete revolutionary disruption but rather a safer and more efficient upgrade. Canton Network does not attempt to overthrow existing systems; instead, it uses technological means and architectural design to enable existing financial infrastructures to smoothly connect to blockchain, becoming a "bridge" and "operating system" that connects existing financial fortresses.

An "Operating System" That Understands Financial Business

Institutional business requires controllability, privacy protection, and refined risk management within a compliance framework. Canton addresses two major deadlocks for institutions:

1. The Paradox of Privacy and Transparency: Institutional business cannot operate on a completely transparent ledger. Canton's "configurable privacy" acts like one-way glass installed in every transaction room: transaction details are only visible to relevant parties, while outsiders cannot peek in. This is not a simple "permission setting" but a programming-level privacy achieved at the smart contract level, allowing institutions to confidently move core business on-chain while complying with global regulatory frameworks (such as GDPR, MiCA).

2. The Dilemma of Isolation and Interconnection: Financial institutions want to maintain system independence and control while desiring seamless interaction with other systems. Canton's modular architecture and global synchronizer technology perfectly respond to this need. Unlike Solana, which rushes all vehicles onto a single highway to race, it has built a network composed of countless dedicated roads and ensures that transactions on these roads can be synchronized through "atomic interoperability." This means that on Canton, the issuance, trading, repurchase, and settlement of government bonds can be combined into a fully automated process like Lego, without relying on the uncontrollable risks of "cross-chain bridges."

Therefore, what Canton essentially provides is not another "blockchain platform," but an "operating system" that better understands financial business. It has been specifically designed to meet the actual needs of institutions in terms of privacy protection, compliance, cross-system interoperability, and governance mechanisms.

As the global regulatory framework for stablecoins becomes clearer and the trend of traditional asset tokenization accelerates, the demand for institutional-grade blockchain is becoming evident. With its early positioning and understanding of financial institutions' needs, Canton is becoming an important player in this emerging field.

Why Financial Institutions Choose Canton Over Other Platforms?

There are competitors in the market. While Polygon and Avalanche actively collaborate with some financial institutions, their core ecosystems remain focused on retail and DeFi, making it difficult to fully meet the strict requirements of institutions for privacy and compliance. R3 Corda is also positioned as an institutional chain, but its inclination towards a consortium chain model limits broader liquidity sharing due to insufficient openness. JPMorgan's Onyx platform has certain functional advantages, but its services mainly cater to JPMorgan itself and a few partners, lacking industry-level neutrality.

In contrast, Canton's uniqueness lies in its genuine balance of compliance and openness. It is neither completely transparent like public chains to the point of losing privacy protection nor overly closed like consortium chains, making it difficult to form network effects. In other words, it is an operating system for interconnectivity among financial institutions, rather than an isolated testing ground.

Beyond Tokenization: Promoting an "On-Chain" Model for Financial Business

While many projects remain at the first step of "asset tokenization," Canton has gone further in practice. It now processes over $4 trillion in RWA assets each month and completes $10 billion in U.S. Treasury repurchase transactions daily. These real data fully demonstrate its technological reliability and applicability in production environments. More importantly, Canton is currently the only infrastructure that can simultaneously meet the regulatory requirements of the U.S., Europe, and Asia. This characteristic enables it to provide a compliant foundation for cross-border financial business, eliminating operational barriers caused by regulatory differences.

What is even more noteworthy is that Canton is driving financial business towards an "on-chain" model. The recent weekend on-chain government bond financing transaction is an important milestone, proving that Canton can support traditional non-trading hour business operations and demonstrating its potential to achieve true "On-Chain Finance."

Unlike other projects that focus solely on asset tokenization, Canton is deeply collaborating with institutional partners like Goldman Sachs and HSBC to natively migrate the entire process of issuance, trading, settlement, and custody onto the chain. This holistic solution model sets it apart from many RWA projects and lays a solid foundation for future scalable applications.

As more financial institutions join and business scenarios expand, Canton is evolving from Wall Street's infrastructure to the "operating system" of the global financial industry. Its development trajectory indicates that the true value of blockchain technology in finance lies not in simply replicating existing businesses but in reconstructing business processes through technological innovation, achieving a leap in efficiency while maintaining compliance and security.

Conclusion: A Financial Bridge Connecting East and West

The practices of Canton Network reveal an important trend: the competitive focus of financial infrastructure is shifting from pure technical performance to a deep understanding of business essence, regulatory logic, and institutional needs.

By organically integrating traditional financial rules with blockchain technology, Canton not only achieves technological innovation but also builds a financial operating system that respects the characteristics of both Eastern and Western markets. Its ability to meet the regulatory framework needs of both European and Asian markets naturally endows it with the function of connecting global financial markets.

The balance achieved between innovation and compliance positions Canton to become an important underlying facility supporting future global financial business, providing new possibilities for cross-border capital flows and financial collaboration.