Digital Asset expands its Canton funding round as institutional tokenization bets deepen

Digital Asset has widened the financing round behind Canton, pulling in another $10 million from Shinhan Financial Group and SC Ventures and pushing the total raise tied to its latest capital campaign to $365 million. The added money matters less for the headline number than for what it signals about buyer conviction: institutions are still willing to fund the middleware layer for tokenized finance, not just the assets themselves. In this case, the pitch is that capital-markets participants need shared blockchain infrastructure that can support privacy, compliance, and synchronized settlement without forcing firms to give up the control standards they expect in regulated markets.

The new investment extends a much larger round that Digital Asset announced on June 11, when the company said it had raised $355 million led by a16z crypto with participation from a long list of institutions spanning traditional finance and digital assets, including ABN Amro, Apollo Funds, BNP Paribas, Broadridge, Citadel Securities, CME Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, HSBC, S&P Global, SoFi, and Tradeweb. That announcement framed the company’s strategy clearly: use new capital to expand Canton across assets, applications, and regulated workflows rather than treating the network as a narrow crypto venue. The latest top-up keeps that thesis intact while holding the company’s valuation at roughly the same $2 billion level attached to the earlier round.

The core bet is that tokenization only becomes commercially meaningful when it plugs into the workflows institutions already run at scale. Digital Asset has argued that privacy-preserving shared infrastructure is one of the missing pieces holding back wider blockchain adoption in finance, and Canton’s product positioning reflects that view. Instead of emphasizing open participation first and institutional controls later, the network has been built around permissioning, compliance, and interoperability for firms that want blockchain-based coordination without exposing all activity to the full market. That makes the company’s fundraising more relevant to RWA markets than a typical venture round: it is financing the rails that issuers, dealers, custodians, and market infrastructure operators may use to move Treasury assets, funds, and collateral onchain.

There is already evidence that the platform is being pushed toward that role. In December 2025, DTCC, Digital Asset, and the Canton Network said they were working to mint a subset of DTC-custodied U.S. Treasury securities on Canton, describing the effort as the first step in a broader strategy to hold securities onchain while keeping them within familiar post-trade controls. The partners said the initial phase would target a controlled production MVP and then widen over time, with the stated goal of improving access to digitized instruments in a regulated environment. That is the kind of project institutional investors in infrastructure tend to watch closely, because it connects tokenization to incumbent market plumbing rather than to standalone crypto distribution.

Canton has also been building evidence around investment-product distribution and collateral utility. Franklin Templeton said in November 2025 that its Benji technology platform was expanding to Canton, giving institutional clients access to tokenized investment products through the network and linking those products to Canton’s global collateral framework. In February 2026, Digital Asset and a consortium including LSEG, Euroclear, Citadel Securities, Tradeweb, Societe Generale, Virtu Financial, DTCC, Cumberland DRW, TreasurySpring, and Archax said they had completed another set of cross-border collateral mobility transactions on Canton. That round included tokenized gilt activity and cross-currency intraday repo flows using tokenized deposits, which is a more operationally meaningful signal than generic partnership language because it points to repeated testing of settlement and financing mechanics.

The addition of Shinhan Financial Group and SC Ventures is notable in that context. Shinhan gives the round another large Asian banking anchor, while SC Ventures adds a strategic investor tied to Standard Chartered’s innovation arm and its ongoing interest in tokenized assets, digital money, and market infrastructure. Neither name transforms Canton on its own, but both reinforce the idea that institutions see value in owning part of the network layer before tokenized capital markets become fully mainstream. For Digital Asset, expanding the round rather than announcing an entirely new financing also suggests the company is still capitalizing on momentum created by the June raise and by the growing list of production-oriented experiments happening across the network.

The larger implication for RWA markets is that infrastructure financing is becoming a story in its own right. Tokenized funds and Treasury products may win the public attention, but the next phase of competition is increasingly about where those assets settle, how they move as collateral, and which networks can satisfy regulators, custodians, and large financial institutions at the same time. Digital Asset’s expanded round does not prove that Canton will dominate that stack, but it does show investors are prepared to keep funding the institutional middleware required to make tokenization work beyond pilots. If that conviction continues, the winners in onchain finance may be defined not only by who issues the next tokenized product, but by who controls the network that makes those products usable inside global market structure.