Ekiden has launched its mainnet on Canton Network, becoming the first CLOB-based derivatives exchange on the network after months of building and testnet trading. The launch brings a new piece of trading infrastructure to Canton, adding a professional trading layer to an ecosystem built around privacy, compliance, settlement, and institutional asset movement.
Mainnet launches with controlled access. The top 100 traders from Ekiden's testnet leaderboard will be the first to trade, receiving their access code and mainnet link directly, with more traders onboarded in waves as access expands across the community.
Ekiden is designed for professional trading firms, market makers, funds, banks, and institutional trading desks that need execution workflows closer to traditional capital markets than retail-focused DeFi venues. The platform combines CLOB and RFQ-based settlement with PropAMM integration, a trading terminal, and API connectivity for trading aggregators, algorithmic platforms, exchanges, and funds.
The launch comes as institutional interest in digital assets continues to rise, while on-chain derivatives infrastructure remains early compared with traditional markets. Recent survey data shows that 73% of institutional decision-makers plan to increase allocations to digital assets in 2026, while 56% expect to engage with DeFi protocols by 2028. Traditional derivatives markets remain far larger by comparison, with OTC interest rate derivatives alone reaching $7.9 trillion in average daily turnover in April 2025.
Ekiden argues that existing on-chain markets have largely been shaped around retail flow, passive liquidity, and public execution environments, while professional trading firms need deeper liquidity, deterministic execution, better price discovery, custom privacy, a reliable API, and infrastructure capable of supporting larger, more systematic order flow.
"Tokenization alone does not create institutional markets," said Vitali Dervoed, founder and CEO of Ekiden. "For tokenized assets to trade at scale, institutions need execution quality, liquidity, privacy, and workflows that reflect how professional trading actually works. Canton provides the institutional environment. We add the trading infrastructure layer for on-chain derivatives."
Viv Diwakar, Head of the Canton Foundation, said Ekiden's mainnet is a notable addition to Canton's application layer, bringing order book execution, privacy, and settlement into a single venue designed for professional trading, and that launches like this act as a catalyst as the network broadens its offerings in on-chain derivatives.
During its first week on the Canton testnet, Ekiden recorded 1,502 active users, more than 72,000 trades, and approximately $8.9 million in trading volume. The company is also working with 11 integration partners and has integrated 12 market makers as it prepares to expand liquidity on mainnet.
In May 2026, Ekiden raised $2 million in a seed round to build institutional-grade infrastructure for on-chain derivatives, with investors and strategic participants connected to GSR, Flowdesk, Pyth, Aptos, G20, DCF God, Curiosity Capital, and Keyrock.
With mainnet live, the full lifecycle of an institutional derivatives trade, from execution to settlement, can now happen on-chain without exposing positions, order flow, or capital movements. Liquidity is currently supported by market makers including Keyrock, Kappa Lab, and Flowdesk, with Ekiden planning to expand liquidity further, onboard additional market makers, and broaden its product range as trading activity on Canton grows.
