Northern Trust has announced a formal agreement with Digital Asset to develop and deploy custody and asset servicing workflows for tokenized financial assets on the Canton Network. The integration marks a significant expansion of Canton's institutional custody layer, adding one of the most trusted names in global asset servicing to its growing roster of financial market participants.
Extending a Century of Custody Expertise On-Chain
Northern Trust's decision to build on Canton is grounded in a straightforward strategic logic: the assets its clients hold are moving on-chain, and custody infrastructure must move with them. The integration will leverage Northern Trust's existing digital assets platform to support custody and asset servicing for tokenized assets issued or transacted on Canton — running digital and traditional assets side by side within the same institutional framework.
Guy Gibson, co-president of Asset Servicing and head of Institutional Banking and Markets at Northern Trust, framed the rationale clearly: "Connecting to the Canton Network allows us to extend our asset servicing role into new market structures while maintaining the same principles of scale, control, and risk management that clients expect from Northern Trust."
Justin Chapman, Group Head of Strategic Partnerships at Northern Trust, highlighted the firm's blockchain-agnostic approach: "Our platform is designed to integrate with our core asset servicing infrastructure to support digital and traditional assets side by side. Leveraging these capabilities and building a custody application on the Canton Network will allow us to apply our blockchain-agnostic, asset-agnostic approach as markets continue to evolve."
A Critical Missing Piece for Institutional Adoption
Custody has long been identified as one of the key enablers of institutional digital asset adoption. Institutional investors — pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, insurance companies, and asset managers — require custody solutions that meet the same regulatory standards, audit requirements, and risk controls as their traditional asset holdings. Northern Trust's integration brings exactly that to Canton.
Yuval Rooz, CEO of Digital Asset and co-founder of the Canton Network, underscored the significance: "As more real-world assets move on-chain, custodians play a critical role in enabling adoption within regulated markets. This integration with Northern Trust underscores how traditional asset servicing models can seamlessly extend into digital market infrastructure, while maintaining the controls institutions require."
Canton's Custody Layer Takes Shape
Northern Trust joins a Canton ecosystem that already includes DTCC, Euroclear, JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, and Visa among its institutional participants. With custody now being built natively on the network by one of the world's most respected custodians, Canton is completing another critical component of the full institutional financial lifecycle — from asset issuance and trading, through settlement, to custody and reporting — all within a single, interoperable, privacy-preserving infrastructure. For institutions evaluating whether Canton can serve as their primary on-chain operating environment, Northern Trust's commitment is a powerful answer.
