Key Takeaways
- Institutional adoption of tokenisation has witnessed rapid growth with market size expected to reach $16 trillion by 2030.
- Adoption is being driven by four converging forces: global regulatory clarity, institutional mandate from central market infrastructure providers, yield compression in traditional fixed income, and the inefficiency of legacy settlement infrastructure.
- Despite significant investment over the past decade, most institutional blockchain initiatives failed at the proof-of-concept stage. There has not been a blockchain that has successfully addressed all three prerequisites necessary for institutional players - privacy, embedded compliance and interoperability.
- Canton Network is equipped to address all three issues, with backing from the world’s leading financial institutions and operations constantly expanding. Infrastructure providers such as Cantor8 leverage the full range of benefits of the Canton Network to make it usable for institutions.
Understanding Tokenisation
In one sentence - the conversion of real world assets into regulated digital instruments on a blockchain. This concept, although met with early skepticism, has now been actively adopted by large institutions, such as BlackRock, Franklin Templeton, HSBC and Goldman Sachs which have all issued tokenised instruments in live production environments.
Projections published in a report by BCG have indicated that the scale of the tokenised asset market will reach 16 trillion USD by 2030, the question now shifting from whether institutional tokenization will happen to which infrastructure it will occur on.
Tokenization is the process of representing ownership rights or economic interests in an asset, such as a bond coupon, royalty stream, equity interest, or commodity receivable, as a digital asset recorded on a distributed ledger. Each digital asset constitutes a negotiable instrument backed by a legally enforceable claim to the underlying security, giving holders rights substantially equivalent to those of traditional securities holders. By recording issuance, transfer, and settlement on a distributed ledger, such instruments can be accessed and transacted by investors globally with settlement finality measured in seconds rather than the days associated with conventional clearing and settlement infrastructure.
Cantor8 is one example of an infrastructure company making it possible for institutions to explore and implement tokenisation, delivering live tokenised issuances across sovereign assets, for institutional clients across Central and Southeast Asia on the Canton Network.
Giving Context to The Recent Surge in Tokenisation
The concept of tokenisation is not a new idea, it has been discussed for more than a decade but lacked any meaningful implementation and scale. It is therefore crucial to understand the conditions for its broader implementation, which can be boiled down to four forces that did not previously exist simultaneously.
Regulatory Clarity
Tokenisation of assets has for a long time existed outside of workable regulation, with little understanding from issuers and regulators alike as to how they can be effectively brought into the economy. Globally there has been a recent shift in this arena, with Hong Kong’s stablecoins ordinance coming into force in August 2025, establishing one of the world's most comprehensive licensing frameworks for fiat referenced stablecoin users, the EU’s MiCA regulation came into force in 2024, and the implementation of new regulation by the AIFC in Kazakhstan enabling a framework for the tokenisation of digital assets within a compliant environment. Most importantly in the United States, the GENIUS Act, signed into law in July 2025 established the first federal regulatory framework for payment stablecoins, clarifying their treatment under securities and commodities law and introducing reserve, disclosure, and AML requirements for permitted issuers.
Institutions now have a defined roadmap to compliance.
Institutional Mandate
Central market infrastructure providers, Euroclear, and the DTCC have moved from observation to active participation. When the organisations that underpin the global settlement system begin deploying on a network, it signals clearly that the infrastructure has reached the maturity required for institutional use. DTCC's selection of Canton Network to tokenise US Treasury securities is widely viewed as the most significant institutional endorsement in the history of the asset class.
Compression of Yields in Traditional Instruments
With major economies having lower levels of yield on their government bonds, institutional investors have sought out diversification. Institutional investors, particularly in Asia have actively looked for alternative asset classes that can deliver higher yields within a compliant framework. Tokenised real-world assets such as agricultural receivables, gold royalties, emerging market sovereign debt, offer yield profiles of 10% to 12% that are not available through traditional fixed income channels.
This demand-side pressure is a clear structural driver of adoption.
Outdated Settlement Infrastructure
The financial system still settles in a T+2 model i.e. there are two business days between trade date and settlement date in which sides are bearing counter-party risk. With trillions of dollars moving daily, this is an inefficient way to process transactions. Atomic settlement however allows trade to be settled instantly across the blockchain network as both sides of the trade are settled at the same moment in time. This improvement in operations and capital efficiency is no longer viewed as a potential Blockchain benefit - it is an operational imperative that the industry is already starting to pursue.
Why Existing Infrastructure Has Failed Institutions
For many years, organisations have been pouring millions of dollars into blockchain development. However, very few endeavours have advanced beyond a proof-of-concept. The reason for this poor success rate isn’t a lack of capital or interest in the emerging technology, but rather that current blockchain solutions can meet at most two of three hard prerequisites for institutional players.
Three Non-Negotiables
Privacy: On a public blockchain, all transactions are visible to all participants on the network. For a trading desk rolling out a large position, a government issuing debt, or an institution managing client assets, public visibility is not merely inconvenient, it is legally and commercially untenable. Institutions cannot operate in an environment where their counter-parties, volumes, and pricing are observable by competitors and the public in real time.
Regulatory Compliance: Financial institutions operate under strict KYC, AML, and sanctions obligations. Public blockchains are permissionless by design and any address can transact with any other. There is no mechanism to enforce compliance at the network level. Building compliance as an external layer on top of a permissionless network is architecturally fragile and does not satisfy the requirements of regulators who expect controls to be embedded in the settlement infrastructure itself.
Settlement Finality: At present public blockchains typically provide only probabilistic settlement for transactions. In these systems, a transaction is final after some fixed number of subsequent blocks have been added to the blockchain and such transactions cannot be reversed. However, from an institutional perspective, parties expect transactions to be settled deterministically and immediately, irreversibly, upon execution - in other words, they expect the same certainty that blockchain is supposed to bring over peer to peer transaction risk, but without the counterparty.
No general purpose blockchain has adequately addressed all key issues. Solutions in regard to privacy complicate the process, any compliance mechanisms still remain external to the settlement mechanism, and the level to which institutions expect settlement finality cannot be guaranteed.
Indeed private permissioned blockchains solve certain key issues - They successfully address the compliance and privacy problems however introduce the new issue of control by a single operator. This means no interoperability between institutions and no open governance framework that guarantees the neutrality of the infrastructure. They recreate the very siloing problem that distributed ledger technology was intended to solve.
The industry needed an architecture that was designed from first principles around the requirements of regulated finance, not adapted from a general-purpose protocol.
Canton Network is that architecture.
Canton Network - The Only Solution
Canton Network was designed specifically for regulated financial markets by Digital Asset and announced in May 2023. It was backed at inception by Goldman Sachs, BNP Paribas, Deutsche Boerse, and a consortium of over thirty major financial institutions. It has since grown to include DTCC and Euroclear as governance co-chairs, and is governed by the Canton Foundation (originally known as the Global Synchronizer Foundation), an independent non-profit body established under the Linux Foundation in 2024.
Canton addresses each of the three institutional non-negotiables directly, through architectural choices made at the foundation of the network rather than applied as subsequent layers.
Privacy By Design
Canton's privacy model operates at the sub-transaction level. Unlike public blockchains where transaction data is globally visible, Canton ensures that the details of any given transaction counter-parties, volumes, pricing, asset identifiers are visible only to the parties explicitly authorised to see them. This is not a privacy layer added on top of the network; it is a property of the Daml smart contract language that governs every transaction on Canton. Privacy is enforced by the protocol itself.
Atomic settlement
All transactions on Canton are settled atomically (both sides of the trade are guaranteed to have completed their obligations simultaneously in one transaction with no risk of one party having delivered and the other not) and once settled on the network the transaction is final, removing counter-party risk during the settlement period. This is a fundamental improvement to current settlement infrastructure (e.g. T+2) for the asset classes that Canton is currently optimised for. In practice infrastructure providers on the network such as Cantor8, engineer these settlement workflows managing the full issuance lifecycle without requiring any technical knowledge of the underlying infrastructure from the issuers.
The Global Synchronizer (Interoperability Without Centralisation)
Canton’s interoperability model is based around the Global Synchronizer; a neutral, decentralised structure for maintaining a time-ordering of transactions across all Canton applications. This allows applications built on top of Canton to interoperate, for instance to transfer assets, submit cross-application transactions and keep corresponding application state synchronised. All of this is achieved without a central party having privileged access or control of the information, and with non-involved parties never seeing the details of the transaction. This problem of interoperability is one that private permissioned blockchain systems are unable to solve.
Live Institutional Deployments
- European Investment Bank [100M Euro Digital Bond]: The EIB issued its first euro-denominated digitally native bond on a private blockchain via Goldman Sachs’ GS DAP platform, built on Canton’s Daml infrastructure. The transaction settled atomically at T+0 and was listed on the Luxembourg Stock Exchange.
- DTCC [US Treasury Tokenisation]: The Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation, which processes the majority of US securities settlements, selected Canton Network to tokenise DTC-custodied US Treasury securities.
- HKSAR [Sovereign Green Bond]: The Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Government issued the world’s first government tokenised green bond in February 2023, an HK$800 million issuance settled via Goldman Sachs’ GS DAP platform, which is built on Canton’s Daml infrastructure.
Competitive Landscape
There are two main types of tokenisation infrastructure providers: on the one hand general-purpose public and private L1 and L2 blockchain networks and on the other private permissioned blockchain networks operated by individual institutions or banks as part of a consortium of companies. Canton creates a new third option: a public, permissioned network for regulated institutional finance. The following table summarises what sets Canton apart.
The competitive picture is clear. Public chains do not satisfy the three criteria most critical for regulated institutions: privacy, compliance and governance. Canton is the only network that addresses all criteria simultaneously, and the only one with a live production track record at institutional scale.
To this end, infrastructure providers such as Cantor8 leverage the full breadth of Canton’s advantages in live production. Cantor8’s C8 Registry is a direct example: a B2B token issuance engine built natively on Canton that covers the full issuance lifecycle, from origination to secondary transfer, with compliance controls including minting, burning, freezing, and redemption embedded directly at the smart contract level. Tokens issued through the C8 Registry maintain full privacy by default and the product is fully STO-ready, allowing institutions to launch compliant, privacy-enabled assets on Canton without building the infrastructure themselves.
Conclusion
The question that dominated institutional blockchain discussion for a decade, whether a distributed ledger could meet the privacy, compliance, and settlement requirements of regulated finance, has been answered.
Canton Network has resolved each of the three non-negotiables through deliberate architectural choices, validated by live deployments at the highest levels of the global financial system. A $16 trillion tokenisation market will not be built on general-purpose public chains that cannot satisfy institutional compliance requirements.
The remaining question is not which network will underpin institutional tokenisation. It is which participants will be best positioned within that network when the full scale of deployment arrives. Cantor8 operates as the execution layer of Canton, building the tooling, smart contracts, and issuance infrastructure that translate the network’s capabilities into deployable products for enterprises, governments, and asset managers. A member of the Canton Network ecosystem, Cantor8 brings Canton’s infrastructure to bear on real assets in markets that global capital has historically been unable to access. As tokenisation accelerates across Central Asia, the Middle East, and beyond, Cantor8’s position within Canton’s infrastructure fabric places it at the centre of that deployment.
Resources
- Canton Network: Official Website
- Investax: The 5 Institutional Use Cases of Tokenized Funds
- Boston Consulting Group (BCG): Relevance of on-chain asset tokenization in ‘crypto winter’
- Cantor8: Official Website
- Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA): Regulatory Regime for Stablecoin Issuers
- Societe Generale: MICA entered into force on 30 December 2024
- KPMG: Digital Assets in Central Asia and Caucasus
- Canton Network: Canton’s Industry Working Group Advances Cross-Border Collateral Mobility on Canton
- Reuters: Asia's wealthy investors seek more crypto in portfolios
- The Payments Association: What an atomic settlements boom could mean for the payments industry
- Digital Asset: Official Website
- Canton Foundation: Official Website
- Digital Asset (Official Docs): Get started with smart contract development
- European Investment Bank: EIB innovates further with Project Venus, the first euro-denominated digital bond on a private blockchain
- Canton Network: The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation and Digital Asset to bring onchain DTC and Fed eligible securities to Canton
- Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA): HKSAR Government’s Inaugural Tokenised Green Bond Offering
