Last week was one of the busiest Canton has had. Korea Blockchain Week brought the network’s leadership to Seoul and in front of the country’s biggest banks. A UK bank and Visa settled stablecoin payments over a weekend. On-chain activity broke new records, led by Temple crossing $1 billion in volume. Meanwhile, the network itself is preparing for one of its biggest upgrades, with a live vote to move MainNet to CantonBFT. Here is everything CantonNews covered from September 28 to October 4, with each update explained in one paragraph.
The week at a glance
- $1 billion in cumulative volume on Temple, days after a $30 million day
- 908,000 parties have now transacted on Canton, up from 20,000 a year ago
- $300 million in total volume on Cantex, up $100 million since August
- Under an hour for Lloyds’ stablecoin payments to reach Visa, weekends included
- October 10 is the proposed date for MainNet’s move to CantonBFT
- 8 apps cleared for Featured App status, and 5 venues gained DvP recognition
Institutions: banks, exchanges and DTCC
Lloyds and Visa settle stablecoin payments over the weekend. Lloyds Banking Group and Visa completed a seven-day pilot covering $750,000 in payment obligations, with funds reaching Visa in under an hour, weekends included. Lloyds bought USDC through UK-regulated exchange Archax, booked the settlements through its Jersey branch and ran its own Canton node using the network’s privacy controls, while Visa settled on a separate public blockchain. For bank treasury teams used to cross-border settlement taking a day or longer, moving money outside banking hours is the headline.
Société Générale puts tokenized collateral into production. Canton’s Tokenomics group approved completion of Société Générale’s first CIP-0115 milestone. It confirms that the bank’s Prime Services & Clearing business accepts eligible Canton assets as collateral and has completed at least one production transaction of $10 million or more. That gives tokenized assets a real job inside an existing institutional service, beyond simply being issued or held on a ledger. The program’s later milestones cover repo, adoption volumes and SG-FORGE stablecoins.
LSEG and Marex move closer to Super Validator rewards. Both firms’ approved Super Validator programs reached on-chain implementation votes on MainNet. Marex’s vote, which closes on October 6, would raise the reward weight of host operator MPC-Holding-Inc from 35 to 45. LSEG’s, which closes on October 9, would take it to 55. Neither vote hands over rewards outright. They accrue to an unclaimed pool, and each firm must show it delivered its agreed milestones before Super Validators approve any release.
DTCC’s tokenization service launches this month, and Canton builders are at the table. DTC holds more than $114 trillion in securities, and its tokenization service, which runs on both Canton and a private Hyperledger Besu network, reaches commercial launch in October. Our analysis looks at what even a small slice of that would mean on-chain, and why Canton’s fee burn depends on activity rather than headline value. Canton builders are getting involved too: Palladium Labs, the team behind Alpend, and Swap.monster both joined DTCC’s working group of more than 100 firms, and Obsidian joined the DTCC-chaired Canton Foundation Collateral Subcommittee.
Korea Blockchain Week: Canton goes to Seoul
Shinhan’s CEO takes the Canton relationship group-wide. Shinhan Financial Group Chairman and CEO Jin Ok-dong hosted Digital Asset CEO Yuval Rooz and Canton Foundation President Viv Diwakar at the group’s Seoul headquarters. The talks covered linking Shinhan Bank’s payment and settlement rails with Shinhan Securities’ tokenized-asset distribution and Shinhan Asset Management’s real-world asset business, and opening Korean financial products to global investors. It caps a busy 2026 for Shinhan: a governance MOU in June, investments in Digital Asset’s $365 million round in July, and Shinhan Asset Management becoming Canton’s first Korean Super Validator in September.
Korea’s biggest financial names gather around Canton. The Canton Foundation and Noves co-hosted The Capital Forum with IBM and Tiger Research, Canton’s first institutional forum in Korea. Shinhan Asset Management, Mirae Asset Securities, KB Securities, Franklin Templeton and Fidelity were in the room, preparing for Korea’s token-securities framework, which takes effect on February 4, 2027. Zenith separately hosted Seoul Table, a lunch attended by Woori Bank, Mirae Asset, Kyobo Life, Meritz Securities and others. No new deals were announced, but the turnout shows how seriously Korean institutions are preparing. Noves is now taking the roadshow to Tokyo.
The message from Seoul: markets, not chains. In his Korea Blockchain Week keynote and again at the STO Summit at the Korea Exchange, Viv Diwakar argued that tokenized assets only become useful once they can be traded, swapped for cash or posted as collateral across connected systems. His example was a Seoul-issued money market fund whose holder obtains dollars from a counterparty on another network on a Saturday morning, with the asset and payment settling together or not at all. Yuval Rooz made a similar case at EastPoint and RealFi X Asia: measure progress by how much tokenized assets actually move and get used, not by how much has been tokenized.
Network and governance
MainNet’s move to CantonBFT gets a proposed date. Super Validators are voting on migrating the Global Synchronizer to CantonBFT, with the switch proposed for October 10 at 13:00 UTC on protocol version 35. The Global Synchronizer is the shared infrastructure that coordinates activity across Canton applications. The vote had six in favour and none against when we checked, and closes just before 11:00 UTC on October 8. In the same week, Splice 0.8.1 was cleared for MainNet once two-thirds of Super Validator nodes had upgraded, with 0.8.3 and 0.8.4 rolling out on TestNet and DevNet.
908,000 parties have now transacted on Canton. Data from The Tie shows the cumulative number of distinct parties that have made a transaction on Canton rising from 20,000 a year ago to 908,000, more than 45 times higher. A party is an on-chain identity rather than a verified individual, and the figure counts everyone who has ever transacted rather than daily users. Even so, it shows how quickly participation has grown over the past twelve months.
The validator set keeps growing, with Mirae Asset among the newcomers. Mirae Asset Securities, Ankr Labs and Rome Protocol were among 60 organisations approved as Canton validator operators in the September 30 batch. A separate MainNet allocation notice named 43 organisations, including Upflam, CCTools, BTCS and Kustodia. Approval and allocation are separate steps, and each operator still has to bring its node online, with capacity set at 50 validators a week. A draft proposal would also record each Super Validator reward-right holder and their weight directly on the ledger, making the split visible in Scan.
Eight apps clear Featured App review, and five venues earn DvP recognition. Meridiant, Rocky Wallet, Jubilee, Selay Wallet, Wintip, SyncVotes, Nocturnal Wallet and BETH cleared Tokenomics review for Featured App status. Each now goes to a separate on-chain Super Validator vote before its status becomes active. For SyncVotes, the decision came days after it renewed its application following its v2 rebuild. Console, Cantex, OneSwap, Tradecraft and C8 also received delivery-versus-payment recognition. When Canton rewards are calculated, their qualifying trades, where both sides settle together, now count as DvP.
A new wave of applications, from fine art to remittances. CanTra is seeking Featured App status ahead of a digital security linked to Francis Bacon’s 1963 triptych Three Studies for Portrait of George Dyer, with a €100 minimum for eligible investors. Canal applied after a controlled MainNet pilot of iSOL, its SOL-backed asset, while ScopeX is building Rate Lock, which sends euros to bank accounts in India once a chosen exchange rate is hit. Cardiv and Slay Money applied for DvP recognition. Cardiv is a self-custodial order-book exchange, and Slay Money’s model locks a prediction-market stake into a dollar stablecoin as soon as the bet is placed. None of these requests has been approved yet.
Development Fund proposals target payments, vaults and privacy. Three requests reached the Canton Development Fund. Cayvox Labs resubmitted Payvol, a 1.9 million CC plan for a shared payment-request standard that would let any app ask any compatible wallet for payment by QR code, link or invoice. Mystic Finance proposed a shared vault standard, so wallets could support vaults without a custom integration for each one. Primus Labs and HashCloak asked for 1,303,500 CC to let Canton apps check facts drawn from private web data through proofs, without ever seeing the data. All three are still under review.
Builders and developers
Ethereum developers can now build on Canton. Zenith opened its EVM testnet to the public, letting Solidity developers deploy on Canton with MetaMask, Foundry, Hardhat and Remix, without rewriting code or using a bridge. Its external_call() primitive lets a single transaction combine Daml and EVM operations that either both succeed or both fail. It is scheduled for MainNet in the Canton 3.6 release in Q4 2026. Two days later, Kaiko deployed its Data On-Ramp oracle on Zenith, the first institutional-grade oracle there, bringing regulated pricing data to lending, collateral and perpetuals apps.
New tools make Canton easier to build on and explore. Canton’s Q3 developer update added an AI assistant to the official documentation, a Developer Hub catalogue with AI search, Walnut’s dpm trace transaction inspector and Certora’s daml-analyzer. CC Space brought its AI-powered explorer to TestNet with alerts, analytics and an API. C7 launched a public directory where anyone can look up an organisation by name, web domain or Party ID and see whether its domain has been verified.
Private transfers you can still verify. Digital Asset introduced the Proof of Transfer API through DA Registry, so wallets, exchanges and explorers can show whether a Canton transfer succeeded, is pending or failed without revealing confidential details. Bybit has already integrated it for privacy-enabled assets, including USDCx. On the payments side, Upflam is preparing a deposit pool that makes it harder to link a payment’s sender and recipient, and has invited participants to its cryptographic key ceremony ahead of launch.
HackCanton Season 3 heads into its final week. Around 450 builders from 48 countries registered, 82% of them taking part for the first time, and the competition had 85 teams and 44 projects as of October 2. Submissions close on October 9, judging runs from October 10 to 18, finalists are announced on October 19 and the Grand Final follows on October 21. A separate 10,000 CC Grofty bounty pays 5,000, 3,000 and 2,000 CC for the best working wallet-and-onboarding experiences on MainNet.
Markets and trading
Temple crosses $1 billion. Temple’s trading engine passed $1 billion in cumulative volume on September 30, two days after a single day topped $30 million. Both milestones follow Lightspeed 2.0, the upgraded matching engine that Temple says can handle more than 85 million orders a day, match orders in 3.6 milliseconds and settle 29 times as much as before. Temple plans to use that capacity to bring in more assets, liquidity and trading accounts in Q4, and Send Wallet users can now trade on desktop through Send Connect.
Cantex passes $300 million as Tradecraft gathers pace. Cantex reached $300 million in total trading volume, $100 million more than at its August milestone. Through Cantex Connect, any compatible wallet can swap across more than 100 pairs by sending a transfer with instructions, with swaps typically completing in 10 to 15 seconds. Tradecraft, which runs pool-based trading on Canton, reported more than $2.5 million in volume over 14 days and gained DvP recognition in the same week.
Canton Coin becomes collateral on every Canborsa market. Canborsa, the multichain perpetuals exchange for crypto, stocks and commodities, now accepts CC as collateral across all of its markets, so holders can open positions without first swapping into a stablecoin. To mark the change, a 14-day competition shares 5,000 CC among the top 10 traders, and a daily 250 CC prize goes to one trader who does at least $1,000 in volume. The platform also passed $35 million in total volume and refreshed its trading screens.
Ekiden adds gold and silver and passes $5.8 million. Invite-only derivatives exchange Ekiden launched XAU/USDCx and XAG/USDCx markets, which trade from Sunday evening to Friday afternoon New York time and earn a 2× XP multiplier during the closed MainNet phase. Cumulative volume has reached $5,865,560 while access is still limited. Want in? Ekiden access codes are available on the CantonNews Canton Access page.
Edel’s stock tokens reach $2 million, with staking targeted this week. Combined trading in SPYe and QQQe, Edel’s tokens linked to the S&P 500 and Nasdaq-100, reached $1 million in under a week and $2 million two days later. The tokens are debt instruments that provide economic exposure, not direct ownership of ETF shares. Next is EDEL staking, which Edel is targeting for this week, with Canton Coin rewards, lower trading fees and reward multipliers. An exact opening date and yield rate have not been announced.
More venues are opening. Titan launched its testnet for a perpetual futures exchange built around private order books, a week after opening its waitlist. Ibex listed cETH-PERP on its beta MainNet, a perpetual market on onRails’ ETH-backed cETH, and Nuxaris opened cBTC/CC swaps as the first step in its DEX rollout. Kintsu previewed its private beta, where users will be able to supply USDC, borrow against Canton Coin and request CC staking.
Assets, wallets and access
More ways in: OneSwap bridges eight networks, and Litecoin is on the way. OneSwap launched a Squid-powered bridge that converts USDC, USDT, ETH, BNB, POL and AVAX on Ethereum, Base, Arbitrum, BNB Chain, Polygon, Optimism, Avalanche and Linea into Canton Coin, and back again. Greywick Digital signed an MOU with the Litecoin Foundation to bring Litecoin to Canton as cLTC, targeting the end of 2026 once reserve addresses and attestations are published. Slay Money added Exolix cross-chain swaps inside its app.
Cantonloop is now Loop Wallet. Five North and Loop have split their brands. Cantonloop becomes Loop Wallet and Lighthouse becomes Loop Data, alongside Loop SDK, under a new Loop Suite, while Five North keeps the fund and Super Validator operations. Wallets and balances are untouched, and moving to the new wallet domain is optional.
Grofty Lens puts Canton market data in one place. Grofty launched Lens, a dashboard covering 32 assets, 67 trading pairs and five exchanges, refreshed every minute, with a route finder and a stablecoin peg monitor. Days later it added portfolio tracking, price alerts, CSV and Excel exports and JavaScript and Python SDKs, and Grofty’s Canton app arrived on Google Play.
Alpend joins DeFiLlama. Lending market Alpend is now tracked on DeFiLlama, which shows its total value locked and active loans separately and publishes the method behind both. Alpend has passed $3 million in TVL. It also launched a portfolio dashboard that shows net APY, interest earned and owed, rewards and liquidation prices in one view.
New ways to buy and earn CC. Japan’s SBI VC Trade added Canton Coin to a recurring-purchase campaign that refunds the spread cost in CC on eligible purchases from October 1 to December 15. Kairo and Askardex launched a 10,000 CC campaign, running until October 9, for swaps made on Kairo with the Askardex wallet. Unhedged detailed its referral rewards: inviters earn 15% of referred users’ eligible fees for 90 days.
Heads-up for Console users: LetsExchange has closed. LetsExchange, the swap service previously integrated into Console Wallet, stopped accepting new exchanges on October 1, citing regulatory complexity and costs. Exchanges created before the cutoff are still being processed, and support stays open until November 30. Console Wallet itself has not closed.
What to watch this week
- October 6: Marex’s Super Validator implementation vote closes
- October 8: CantonBFT vote closes; tentative close of CanTra’s Francis Bacon offering
- October 9: HackCanton submissions close, LSEG’s vote closes, and both the Kairo × Askardex campaign and Canborsa’s Trading Arena end
- October 10: proposed CantonBFT migration at 13:00 UTC
- This week: EDEL staking targeted to open
- This month: DTCC Tokenization Service commercial launch; Canal targets wider iSOL availability for mid-to-late October
Taken together, last week showed Canton growing in two directions at once. Banks, exchanges and market infrastructure are moving from pilots into production, and the on-chain economy around them is posting record volumes and adding new assets, venues and tools almost daily. Click through to any update above for the full story, and subscribe to the CantonNews newsletter to get this recap in your inbox every week.
