Digital Asset adds $355M to expand Canton's institutional tokenization push

Digital Asset has raised $355 million in fresh capital, giving one of the most institution-focused blockchain infrastructure companies new resources to push deeper into the market for tokenized financial assets and regulated onchain workflows. The company said the round was led by a16z crypto and included a long list of traditional finance and digital asset backers, from ABN Amro and HSBC to Citadel Securities, CME Ventures, Tradeweb, Coinbase Ventures and S&P Global. For RWA markets, the significance is less about another headline funding round and more about what it says regarding where major financial institutions expect tokenized issuance, collateral and settlement activity to scale.

Digital Asset said the proceeds will be used to expand the Canton ecosystem, deepen work with developers and financial institutions, and support network growth as more institutions bring assets, applications and regulated workflows onchain. In its announcement, the company framed Canton as infrastructure designed specifically for regulated markets, emphasizing privacy, compliance, control and interoperability rather than open participation alone. That positioning matters because a large share of tokenized real-world asset activity still faces a basic institutional hurdle: firms want shared infrastructure, but they do not want to expose commercially sensitive positions, counterparties or workflows in the process.

The company is also tying the raise to a broader claim that the tokenization market is moving past pilots and into infrastructure buildout. Digital Asset said more than 700 ecosystem participants are now involved with Canton and described the next phase of work as focused on areas such as tokenization, collateral mobility, settlement and payments. That is consistent with the way the network has been presented across its own recent announcements. Rather than centering on a single asset class, Canton is being positioned as a coordination layer for multiple regulated products and post-trade functions, especially where institutions need synchronized state changes without giving up privacy controls.

Recent activity around the network gives that strategy more substance. In December, DTCC and Digital Asset announced a plan to tokenize a subset of DTC-custodied U.S. Treasury securities on Canton, with an MVP targeted for the first half of 2026 in a controlled production environment. That initiative is notable because it moves the discussion from abstract tokenization benefits to a concrete workflow around one of the deepest and most systemically important collateral pools in finance. If Treasuries custodied in existing market infrastructure can be represented and mobilized onchain without breaking the legal and operational safeguards institutions require, that opens a much larger lane for tokenized collateral management than most crypto-native experiments have addressed.

Canton has also been accumulating use cases closer to live RWA product markets. Hashnote brought its US Yield Coin, or USYC, onto the network with a pitch built around privacy-preserving collateral mobility and real-time use in trading, cash and risk management workflows. In separate pilot work, Digital Asset, Euroclear and the World Gold Council said they had tokenized gilts, eurobonds and gold to test whether previously immobile assets could be transferred and used as collateral in atomic transactions across connected applications. Together, those efforts show why infrastructure stories matter in RWA: the market does not scale only by issuing more onchain funds, but by making those instruments usable across funding, margin and settlement operations.

There is also a governance and ecosystem angle to the raise. Digital Asset has spent the past year stacking strategic investors that bring distribution and market structure credibility, including BNY, iCapital, Nasdaq and S&P Global in a December strategic round. That matters because tokenization platforms do not win through technology alone. They need custodians, exchanges, market utilities, asset managers, banks and liquidity providers to support common standards and enough interoperable workflows to create network effects. A funding round populated by both crypto and traditional market infrastructure firms suggests Canton is being treated less as a speculative protocol bet and more as a candidate layer for production financial plumbing.

For the RWA sector, the most important takeaway is that capital is still flowing toward middleware that can connect regulated assets to real operational use. The market already has tokenized Treasury funds, money market products and private asset pilots, but those products only become more valuable when they can move across margin systems, treasury stacks, repo-style workflows and cross-institution settlement processes. Digital Asset is making the case that Canton can provide that connective tissue. Whether it succeeds will depend on conversion from pilots to scaled usage, but the size and composition of this round show that major institutions still see tokenization infrastructure as a live buildout phase, not a distant concept.