Digital Asset, the company developing Canton Network, has raised $355 million in a funding round led by a16z crypto, closing what is the largest single raise in the company's history and drawing in a broad coalition of financial institutions as both investors and prospective network users.
The round attracted backing from an Abu Dhabi Investment Authority subsidiary, Apollo Funds, BNP Paribas, Broadridge, Citadel Securities, CME Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, Greenwulf Asset Management, Hanwha Investment & Securities, HSBC, Liberty City Ventures, Optiver, Polychain, S&P Global, SBI Group, SoFi, Tradeweb, and William Blair, among others. CEO Yuval Rooz told The Block that many of these are new investors in Digital Asset, and that participants received equity rather than token allocations. Many are also prospective Canton users.
The expanded balance sheet gives the firm flexibility to pursue acquisitions, participate in ecosystem projects, and invest in accelerating partner relationships. "Now that we have a really good balance sheet, we can actually invest in these relationships to actually accelerate them moving onchain," he said. He added that Digital Asset is not interested in the circular investment strategies common in crypto, such as pledging capital back into partners' funds.
"When you look at these partners, there are quite significant opportunities that are going to be revealed later as a result of these partnerships," Rooz said.
a16z crypto General Partner Ali Yahya described the investment as a bet on foundational infrastructure. "Digital Asset has built one of the clearest examples of blockchain product-market fit in regulated finance," he said. "We believe that Digital Asset is building foundational infrastructure for the next generation of financial markets."
Canton has emerged as a significant player in institutional blockchain over the past year. The network claims to have supported the issuance of $6 trillion in tokenized assets. JPMorgan and DTCC are building on the network, Visa became a Canton Super Validator in March and added Canton to its stablecoin settlement pilot, and a growing roster of financial institutions have committed to the ecosystem across settlement, custody, and tokenization use cases.
The raise follows a $135 million round in June 2025 co-led by DRW Venture Capital and Tradeweb Markets, with participation from Goldman Sachs, Citadel Securities, and DTCC, and a $50 million raise in December 2025 backed by BNY Mellon, Nasdaq, S&P Global, and iCapital. Bloomberg had previously reported Digital Asset was targeting a $2 billion valuation for the new round.
Founded in 2014, Digital Asset designed Canton as a public, permissionless Layer 1 blockchain with configurable privacy features for institutional finance, supporting applications written in Daml, its open-source smart contract language.
