Canton Network Developer Digital Asset Seeks $300M From A16z Crypto

Digital Asset Eyes $300M Round Led by A16z Crypto at $2B Valuation

The round has not closed, and its final size and terms could still change. Investment bank FT Partners is advising Digital Asset on the deal. Neither the company nor A16z Crypto has publicly commented, according to Bloomberg, which first reported on the news.

If completed, the raise would mark the largest single funding round in Digital Asset’s history. The company, founded in October 2014 by Yuval Rooz, Eric Saraniecki, Shaul Kfir, Sunil Hirani, and Don R. Wilson of DRW, has spent more than a decade building distributed ledger technology for institutional capital markets.

Digital Asset is best known for creating Daml, an open-source smart contract language purpose-built for financial applications, and for developing the Canton Network, a public Layer 1 blockchain launched in 2023 alongside Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Börse, BNP Paribas, and others.

The Canton Network is built for institutional finance. It gives participating firms configurable, protocol-level privacy, meaning counterparties share only the data required to settle a transaction. This is a meaningful distinction from fully transparent chains like Ethereum or Solana, where all transaction data is publicly visible.

The network’s Global Synchronizer, governed by the Canton Foundation, enables real-time synchronization of assets and data across applications and subnets without relying on bridges. Institutions use it for tokenized real-world assets, repo financing, collateral mobility, and settlement workflows.

Adoption has grown across Wall Street. Visa joined as the first payments company to serve as a Super Validator in March 2026 and added Canton to its stablecoin settlement pilot. The DTCC announced a collaboration with Digital Asset to tokenize DTC-custodied U.S. Treasuries, targeting 2026. HSBC, S&P Global, BNY Mellon, Citadel Securities, Nasdaq, and Euroclear are among the participants and validators active on the network. To date, Canton has processed or issued over $6 trillion in tokenized assets.

Digital Asset’s prior major raises include a roughly $135 million strategic round in June 2025 led by DRW Venture Capital and Tradeweb Markets, with participation from Goldman Sachs, Citadel Securities, DTCC, and BNP Paribas, followed by a roughly $50 million extension in December 2025 from BNY Mellon, Nasdaq, S&P Global, and iCapital.

A16z Crypto closed its $2.2 billion Crypto Fund V earlier this year, bringing its total dedicated crypto capital to roughly $10 billion across five funds. The firm has publicly identified protocol-level privacy as a missing capability that has slowed blockchain adoption in regulated financial markets. That thesis aligns directly with what Digital Asset and the Canton Network are built to deliver.

Fresh capital would let Digital Asset scale developer tools, add subnets, expand ecosystem onboarding, and push further into cross-border pilots and global collateral network applications. The company remains privately held.

The broader tokenization market has attracted significant institutional attention in 2026, with banks, custodians, and index providers actively moving assets on-chain. Digital Asset is positioning Canton as the compliant, privacy-preserving infrastructure that regulated institutions can actually use.

The round is not finalized. Additional details are expected in the coming weeks.