A Network Designed For Institutions
Canton takes a different approach than most public blockchains. Transaction visibility is highly configurable and scoped to the parties involved, so a trade between two institutions is visible only to those who need to see it rather than being broadcast to the world. While the network is open to anyone, institutions have complete control over the permissioning, privacy, and governance of their applications on the network, enabling institutions like Goldman Sachs, BNP Paribas, Deutsche Börse, Tradeweb, and Euroclear to get the velocity of a public blockchain without giving up the control they require. Most importantly, settlement is atomic across applications. When one side delivers an asset and the other delivers payment, both movements complete together as a single transaction, or neither happens. There is no window where you have paid and your counterparty has not.
From a practical perspective, this approach means that the world’s most trusted assets, from US Treasuries to equities, can exist in tokenized form while keeping the investor protections and ownership rights that make them trusted in the first place.
Just last week, DTCC processed real US trades using tokenized assets held at DTC, in what it describes as the largest tokenization production initiative to date, spanning collateral pledges, repo and equity settlement, and CCP margin workflows. Canton’s creator Digital Asset and Fireblocks are among the participating firms.
The Essential Infrastructure That Makes It Usable
None of this works unless institutions can actually hold, govern, and transact these assets with the controls their risk and compliance teams require. That is the infrastructure Fireblocks provides, and we have been shipping it for Canton since February 2026, steadily deepening this support over the last several months. Today, we support:
- Canton wallets with full custody support, with in-house validator nodes running in two regions, disaster recovery, and transaction visibility through the Cantonscan explorer
- Interoperability with standard compatible wallets and decentralized applications (CIP-0103) such as the Digital Asset Registry app, which supports assets used in over 1.5M daily transactions on the network
- Native Canton Coin transfers via the CIP-056 token standard
- USDC on Canton, available out-of-the-box on Fireblocks workspaces
- Self-serve listing for any Canton token-standard compliant asset, so customers can add tokens like USYC without waiting on an engineering roadmap
- Two-step transaction flows, where an incoming transfer arrives as an offer the receiving institution explicitly accepts, alongside the default pre-approval mechanism
- Bring Your Own Validator, connecting a customer’s own Canton validator node to Fireblocks for signing and custody
- Canton contract calls, so institutions can act on Daml smart contracts directly from Fireblocks: settling DVP trades, pledging collateral, running a repo from proposal through close, allocating assets to settlement obligations, and setting standing pre-approvals
Canton contract call support is an especially important piece to the puzzle. Canton’s Daml contract model is different from the account-based chains most wallet infrastructure is built for, and contract calls are where institutional workflows actually live.
Issuance is getting simpler too. Digital Asset’s newly released Digital Asset Registry, the tokenization launchpad already used by more than 35 platforms and issuers, connects assets to Fireblocks out of the box. An issuer bringing a stablecoin, tokenized deposit, or money market fund to Canton through DA Registry has institutional custody and policy controls available from day one, with no integration project in between.
Fireblocks continues to deepen its support for Canton. In the months ahead, institutions that want dedicated node infrastructure without operating it themselves will be able to use managed, dedicated validators, hosted by Fireblocks on the customer’s behalf.
Canton was designed to meet the demands of global financial markets—offering configurable privacy, control, governance, and compliance. As leading institutions move past pilots into live production on the network, they also require enterprise-grade custody and wallet infrastructure.
Fireblocks’ support on Canton will be instrumental to the next wave of adoption, helping to drive more institutional participation and expand the broader onchain market infrastructure.
Eric Saraniecki
Head of Network Growth at Digital Asset, the creators of Canton
