8 min read
The majority of blockchains are designed in such a way that anyone can see every transaction, every balance and every smart contract call.
While that may work for retail crypto traders, banks, asset managers and clearinghouses can't work that way. They can't show their trading positions, client data or collateral flows to competitors, and privacy and confidentiality rules require them to protect client information.
Canton Network was built to fix that. It is a public layer-1 blockchain designed for privacy-preserving transactions, in which data is shared only with the parties involved. Institutions can issue, trade and settle tokenized assets such as Treasuries, stocks, funds and stablecoins together on one shared network, and each party only sees the data it is entitled to see.
Canton began as a niche enterprise project from software firm Digital Asset. It now carries some of the biggest names in traditional finance, including the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC), the post-trade backbone of U.S. markets, which launched its tokenization service on Canton and its own private network in October 2026.
This guide covers what Canton is, how its privacy model works, who is building on it and what its native token, Canton Coin (CC), does.
Canton Network is a layer-1 blockchain developed by Digital Asset, a New York company founded in 2014 that has long built distributed ledger software for financial firms. Canton launched in May 2023 with a pilot group that included Goldman Sachs, Deloitte, Microsoft and others. Its public infrastructure, the Global Synchronizer, went live in July 2024 together with Canton Coin.
Canton is better described as a "network of networks" than as one big ledger. Each institution runs its own validator node and applications, and its node stores only the data relevant to it, according to Canton's documentation. The nodes connect through the Global Synchronizer, so assets and transactions can move between them atomically: a trade either settles fully on every side or not at all.
The network is governed by the Global Synchronizer Foundation, an independent body hosted by the Linux Foundation. A group of "Super Validators" operates the Global Synchronizer.
Canton's key idea is sub-transaction privacy. Smart contracts on Canton are written in Daml, Digital Asset's open-source contract language. Daml spells out exactly which parties are signatories and observers on each contract. When a transaction runs, each participant's node receives only the parts it is involved in.
Think of a repo trade between two banks with a custodian in the middle. Each party sees and checks its own leg. Nobody else on the network sees the details, and the synchronizer orders and confirms the transaction without reading its contents.
This is very different from Ethereum-style chains, where every node replicates every state change. On Canton, the Global Synchronizer, run by the Super Validators, orders encrypted messages and confirms transactions without seeing their contents, while each institution's own validator node holds its data. Institutions keep control of their data, but can avoid much of the reconciliation that legacy systems require. In practice, most activity on the network is private: about 79% of the updates recorded on Canton in a 24-hour period in November 2026 were private, according to CantonScan.
What sets Canton apart is who uses it. Recent milestones include:
Canton Coin (CC) is the native utility token of the Global Synchronizer. Users pay network fees by burning CC. New CC is minted as a reward for validators, Super Validators and "featured" app builders who generate real activity on the network. This setup is called a burn-mint equilibrium.
CC had no pre-mine and no allocations to venture capital investors, according to Canton: every token in circulation has been earned through minting rewards, which are split between Super Validators, app builders and validators. Whether supply shrinks depends on usage. As of November 2026, the network was burning roughly 80% as much CC each day as it minted, according to CantonScan data, below the 1:1 ratio at which supply would start to shrink. Circulating supply stood at just over 40 billion CC.
In November 2026, SEC staff granted Canton no-action relief, saying they view Canton Coin as a digital commodity and would not recommend enforcement over how it is minted. In May 2026, 21Shares launched the first U.S. ETF offering direct exposure to CC.
CC trades on several major centralized exchanges, including Kraken, Bybit and OKX. CC perpetual futures are also available on Binance Futures, and Alchemy Pay supports buying CC with a card. On Canton itself, Cantex offers onchain swaps. CC is a native coin, not an ERC-20 token, so be wary of look-alike "CC" tokens on Ethereum-based DEXs. You can track Canton Coin's latest price on Decrypt's price page.
Availability varies by region, and nothing in this guide is investment advice.
Canton's next phase is moving from pilots to full production. DTCC's service is now live, and its roadmap adds onchain settlement, collateral management and digital cash. Derivnex and its partners plan to bring cash settlement and collateral management for derivatives directly onto Canton. Expansion in Asia is also picking up: Shinhan Financial Group, Hanwha Investment & Securities, LG CNS and Meritz Securities have all signed Canton deals.
Canton doesn't have a monopoly, though. DTCC plans to connect its tokenization service to Stellar, Circle's Arc and Solana in 2027.
For CC holders, the big question is whether institutional activity grows fast enough that burns outpace issuance. Canton is betting that Wall Street wants privacy and interoperability on a public network, and it has signed up an unusually long list of major financial institutions.
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