What Is Canton Network? The Privacy Blockchain Built for Wall Street

Detailed summary

Canton Network is a privacy-enabled blockchain built for banks and tokenized assets. Here's how it works and what Canton Coin (CC) does.

The majority of blockchains are designed in such a way that anyone can see every transaction, every balance and every smart contract call.

While that may work for retail crypto traders, banks, asset managers and clearinghouses can't work that way. They can't show their trading positions, client data or collateral flows to competitors, and privacy and confidentiality rules require them to protect client information.

Canton Network was built to fix that. It is a public layer-1 blockchain designed for privacy-preserving transactions, in which data is shared only with the parties involved. Institutions can issue, trade and settle tokenized assets such as Treasuries, stocks, funds and stablecoins together on one shared network, and each party only sees the data it is entitled to see.

Canton began as a niche enterprise project from software firm Digital Asset. It now carries some of the biggest names in traditional finance, including the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC), the post-trade backbone of U.S. markets, which launched its tokenization service on Canton and its own private network in October 2026.

This guide covers what Canton is, how its privacy model works, who is building on it and what its native token, Canton Coin (CC), does.

Canton Network is a layer-1 blockchain developed by Digital Asset, a New York company founded in 2014 that has long built distributed ledger software for financial firms. Canton launched in May 2023 with a pilot group that included Goldman Sachs, Deloitte, Microsoft and others. Its public infrastructure, the Global Synchronizer, went live in July 2024 together with Canton Coin.

Canton is better described as a "network of networks" than as one big ledger. Each institution runs its own validator node and applications, and its node stores only the data relevant to it, according to Canton's documentation.

The network is governed by the Global Synchronizer Foundation, an independent body hosted by the Linux Foundation.

In June 2026…

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