# Digital Asset closes $355 million round led by a16z as Canton courts institutions Stabledash Live, a Stabledash show. Oct 12, 2026. Yuval Rooz. https://live.stabledash.com/shows/the-live-show/episodes/canton-network-bets-on-institutions-what-it-takes-to-move-sI9wwPrD-zg Yuval Rooz says excitement about onchain finance runs high, but institutional deployment is still in the first or second inning. Digital Asset has closed a $355 million funding round led by a16z. The company behind Canton Network also brought Visa on as a super validator, and DTCC selected Canton Network for its tokenization infrastructure. Co-founder and CEO Yuval Rooz says the work now is moving institutions onchain. ## Early innings Yuval Rooz puts the industry's willingness and excitement at seven to nine out of ten, but its progress at the first to second inning. He says activity onchain is still primarily retail driven, and that the institutional user experience remains very complicated. Digital Asset has invested in a company trying to streamline that experience for institutional customers. ## Repo as the yardstick Rooz points to Broadridge, which he says went from $1.5 trillion of repo a month to $7-9 trillion in about two years. He says the industry should try to double or quadruple monthly activity every couple of years, and expects Canton Network to approach $50 trillion of monthly value within two to three years. He adds that repo, swaps and FX markets still trade large volumes even when markets are down 10% or 15%. ## Treasury without seed phrases According to Yuval Rooz, any billion dollars of cash a company converts into a money market fund can generate about $35M EBITDA a year. Canton Network is being integrated into a treasury management company serving roughly 4,000 corporates, with a first client he calls very exciting. Rooz says wallets and seed phrases are a barrier, since getting them wrong could lose all the money for the corporate. ## Composability and critics Rooz describes composability as asset or service connectivity whose cost goes toward zero. In his example, a detailed equity portfolio that once took weeks of legal work to pledge as collateral can move in seconds when the lender reads the same ledger. On criticism, Yuval Rooz says he thanks detractors for the free advertising, and argues that if the internet had a token, there would be 30 internets instead of one. Fresh capital and backing from Visa and DTCC give Canton Network institutional credibility. By Yuval Rooz's own account, though, the growth he expects depends on making the network simple enough for corporates to adopt, and he puts the industry only in its first or second inning. ## Key takeaways 1. Digital Asset closed a $355 million round led by a16z, while Visa became a super validator and DTCC selected Canton Network for its tokenization infrastructure. 2. Yuval Rooz says Broadridge repo grew from $1.5 trillion to $7-9 trillion a month in about two years, and he expects about $50 trillion of monthly value moving within two to three years. 3. Rooz argues treasury management is a near-term case, with companies able to generate about $35M EBITDA a year per billion moved into tokenized money market funds. ## Chapters - 0:00 Canton Summit featured live production users, not hype - 2:53 Real-time treasury management can earn corporates more yield - 6:53 Corporates need seamless integrations, not wallets and seed phrases - 8:56 Excitement is high but institutional adoption is still early - 12:45 Aim to double or quadruple monthly volume every few years - 15:26 Institutional volumes are more durable than retail-driven activity - 18:32 Composability makes assets more useful by making connections nearly free - 23:42 Criticism of Canton mostly comes from supporters of rival chains ## Transcript **Yuval Rooz** (0:00) The new core for the next era of finance. **Host** (0:17) It's always a gift to have Yuval on the show. How are you doing, man? Great to see you. **Host** (0:22) Good. Good to be with you guys. Glad to have you back. You're one of our one of our early guests. I mean, we've been doing this show since February. You were in March. A lot of changes on our end. A lot of change definitely on the cans inside. I would love to start unpacking. I mean, since we've had you on, a 16 z led a massive round, 355,000,000 round. Visa's a super validator. We've seen USD 1. We repos, DTCC tokenization. I mean, the list goes on. I probably could just rattle off accolades for the next ten minutes. But you just had Canton Summit last week. I'd love to just dive in first with kind of a recap there. What was that like? What was it like for those who weren't in the room? **Yuval Rooz** (1:06) Yeah. So first of all, thank you. And, yes, a lot of change, but primarily for the industry, which is is a is a good thing. Not... You know, and and I guess we are part of it, so we we are all reaping the benefits, which is which is really good. This was the first time we did a summit, and, you know, we've been thinking quite a lot. What do we want it to be. And I think that after, you know, an industry that is now, you know, you know, twelve plus years old, having another summit that talks about what is happening in the future is not something that we wanna do. Yeah. And and, you know, we didn't wanna have magicians on stage, you know, all kinds of influencers. So the the the... To be honest Any KOLs come? There there were people from the from the, I would say, from the exverse, but it wasn't... They were not on stage. Right? We wanted them... You know, I do think that having people that participate online is great to have them in attendance. But at the end of the day, what we thought would be the best thing to do is to go, you know, boring boring old, you know, tell us what you're already doing on the network. So most of the most of the sessions were people that are in production running on today and really just talking about why they're doing it, why they selected Canton, but actually more importantly, why what they're doing on the network is going to generate money for themselves or for their clients. **Host** (2:53) We we love boring here. We could talk about boring use cases all day, so we don't shy away from that. What is the most boring yet impactful use case kind of example right now running on the network that you would call out? **Yuval Rooz** (3:08) Beside... So we talked a lot about repo, so let's switch gears. I think that a very easy use case to explain is treasury management, and I think you're gonna see a lot of people going after this. So just to explain to the listeners, you know, we we as individuals, we do our own treasury management. So you could think about an individual. Right? We have our bills. We pay cell phone bill, utility bill, rent, all kinds of expenses. But we can also invest our money. Now the best thing for us to do is to make sure that at any given point of time that our money can work for us, meaning they can get yield whether it's through DeFi protocols, investing in treasuries, money market funds. You wanna try to make your money make as much money for you until the point that you then need to convert it into cash because you need to pay rent. And, you know, that is true at an individual level. You don't wanna get stuck at a point where suddenly you need to pay your rent, but all of your money is stuck in a private equity fund as an example. Right? Because you won't be able to liquidate, and you won't be able to pay your rent, and hopefully, we all wanna live live somewhere. So the same analogy works for companies. And there, it's just at a much larger scale where companies that have businesses all over the world, they need to make sure that at any given location where they operate, they have enough cash at any given point of time to fund their business operations. And that's what you would call an operating cash flow. And they would have a function, a treasury management, that tries to maximise the yield out of their balance sheet while not putting their business at risk from not meeting their financial obligations. Now if you think about the world as it is today, moving money around the world or converting your money into yield products is not something that happens in real time. Now imagine that now because of the industry that we've all been part of, you could actually move money around the world 20 fourseven real time, but you can also convert it into yield products. That means that all of these companies can actually generate much more yield from their balance sheet. So to give it in perspective, to put it in perspective, we have been working with a few companies that we're talking about companies that carry billions of dollars of cash on their balance sheet. And the way you could think about it is any billion of dollars of cash that they will now convert into a money market fund, it means that they can generate another, give or take, $35,000,000 EBITDA a year. And that's without changing your business. It's without without, you know, doing any kind of, like, clever things. It's just saying, like, well, I have much more efficient money on my balance sheet, and therefore I will see much more revenue. And what what was in the summit was an integration partner. So it's a company that does treasury management for roughly 4,000 corporates. We're integrating Canton into them, and the first client that we're gonna go live with is a very exciting client that you probably all use regularly. We use... I use them regularly. A lot of people use them regularly. They operate in many countries. And they have a lot of money that goes in and out at very high frequency. And I think that they will have tremendous benefit from that. But once we go live with them, then the goal is to make this product available for 4,000 corporates to start taking advantage of. What that experience look like for the corporates? Are they gonna be aware of this, or how how are they going to be, like, bringing this to market? What's their experience ideally gonna be like? I can't I can't stress how that is the most important question. And just generally speaking in this space, I think that we're seeing a lot of tremendous thing happen in this space, but for the most part it's still very much driven by retail that are willing to go through hoops and loops to to kind of like get access to these cool products that are being offered, not very much at the corporate level. And I think the reason for that is that corporates inherently... If you work at a corporate, you're not really getting paid to take risk. You're getting paid to make sure that the business operates properly. So if you now need to download a wallet, you need to have seed phrases, and if you don't get the seed phrases right, you might lose all the money for the corporate, and all kinds of things like that. I'm I'm exaggerating on purpose, but you get the gist. It's something that I think will be much harder for corporates to pick up. So how do you make the integration very seamless? Meaning, I tick the box on a new offering, and I don't really need to reinvent my business to take advantage of it is is the key. And that's why doing the hard lifting integration with the integration partner that is already offering services to these corporates is where you try to make it much more of like a click accept a new product, and I can start using it rather than click accept, now here's a manual of all the different software that you need to download, all of the different new roles that you need to create in your company to manage keys and all of those things. And as a result of that, you're just not gonna see any pickup. So most of the effort we're doing with the partners that are enabling this new product offering, with a goal for the corporate clients to just accept terms and conditions of a new product and being able to use it. **Host** (8:56) It's such a great moment to be in where where, you know, things that are already being used, adopted, integrated into these systems for enterprise can now just have things like what digital asset offers natively available versus... I mean, I remember when I was at Coinbase on the institutional side, a huge thing that we were trying to sell was like, Just down... Like, use Coinbase, onboard to the institutional product of Coinbase, but it was, you know, completely separate. You had to manage it separately. You had to onboard with it separately, hold those assets separately, account for it separately, and, you know, try to build integrations and make it smooth. But, like, it seems like we're in a moment now with this industry where it's just now available natively where you already are. And so it makes it so much easier to keep things as is versus having to download different things or whatever. Like, what do you... When you think about that, like, would you say, stepping back, I know you've been building digital asset for for many, many, many years, like, do you look at this moment now as that, where we're we're entering this moment of like, the the just check the box moment? Like, we actually gotten to that point where you're gonna start seeing corporates and enterprises actually it's gonna feel that simple, or is that still premature to say? So **Yuval Rooz** (10:18) in a in a recent all hands all hands... Alright. I'm trying to remember our investor update. What I said is I feel like from a willingness and eagerness and excitement about our industry, we're like at, you know, seven to nine. From a progress, we're still at, the first to second inning, which is kind of weird to say after so many years. I I still I don't think we're at that check the box point in time. And again, I think that when you really break down the activity on chain, it is primarily still very retail driven. Which is not necessarily a bad thing, but it just means that in order to get, you know, to the point where we can say this industry is processing in the tens if not hundreds of trillions of dollars of money every day, you need to get institutional adoption and we need to focus. So we as a company made an investment in a company, I cannot share because it's not public, but we made an investment in a company that is really trying to streamline the experience for the institutional customer. Like, so when you look at a lot of the tokenized equities that exist out there, When you ask, like, hedge funds or or other players, why aren't you participating? I think too complicated. I connect to Nasdaq. I trade. It settles through DTCC. It works. Here, it's... The the experience is still just very complicated. So I still think that from a institutional user experience, we're in in early stage. The nice thing about it though, I don't think that we as an industry need to show that much progress to get everyone excited. I think you you could actually... If even if if at like absolute terms, we're gonna show that we can process one to 2% of what I would say mission critical industries, and show that that is now growing month over month. I think that that's enough to get the investors very excited because now they can finally see a trajectory. Okay. Cool. It works. Customers are using it. They're driving the utility out of it. Now it's all about adoption. Right? That it's not about a product market fit or something like that. So I I... I'm I'm totally fine that I still think that we're in the very early innings of of this of this industry. **Host** (12:45) What does your time horizon look like? I think for... You know, we we... If you think about this, the... How much the Internet's grown in the past thirty years, and it's really easy in this space to think about near term, the next year, the next two years. And if you... If you're in the first inning now, what is your time horizon? What is your expectations? How do you lead a team into the next five, ten, fifteen years to to, you know, move into the third inning, move into the fourth inning, and by by what time frame? Just to have, like, realistic expectations while also, you know, keeping investors happy. Yeah. Keeping investors happy and, you know, everything you have to do. Like, it's it's... It feels like such a balancing. **Yuval Rooz** (13:24) Yeah. So I think that one thing that we as an industry should give ourselves some credit, because a lot of times people talk about this industry, and they're saying, like, look. Ten years haven't haven't really haven't really changed much. The reality is that even the Internet did not change the books and records necessarily of financial services. Even AI now. Right? You're interfacing with systems. We as an industry are actually trying to become the backbone of the financial industry. And getting people to get comfortable with new technology to say, well, now this is this is how we manage our books and records as an industry, in my opinion, is a is a significant ask. It's a significant ask and shouldn't be taken lightly what a big ask it is from the market participants. So for me, I think that the way I think about it is we as an industry should, you know, try every couple of years to roughly double or quadruple, you know, the the the activity that is happening, you know, on a monthly basis. So I think, like, about two years ago, Broadridge was doing 1,500,000,000,000 of repo every month. Now they're doing seven to nine. Right? And I think that, you know, that's kind of how I think about it. Like, in two to three years, we should get to a point that on a monthly basis, we're getting close to, you know, $50,000,000,000,000 of value that moves. And I think that, like, that's that's... And and potentially, you're gonna see even a much faster exponential growth. But, you know, I'm not I'm not I'm not aiming for anything else other than just to see the the trajectory. Because, again, once you see these institutional players month over month increasing their volume, it's really all about adoption. And I think for a long time, it was a question, does this technology have a product market fit? Which I think it does. Yeah. You mentioned the investment **Host** (15:34) in one of these companies that really unblocks adoption and brings a lot of these hurdles or these barriers to entry down. When when you... And it's really interesting to hear that that is a strategy that you guys are thinking through because something that I've really appreciated and thought was always very unique about Canton versus other blockchains was like the incentives and the the the token distributions and how you guys have architected that on the infrastructure side with folks like defense or Braille or just these these people who've been really involved in helping the network grow. It's really interesting to hear that you're also taking an approach with, like, investing capital into some of these other companies that are helping the adoption side of this. I know you probably... You you said it's not public, so we don't need to go super into that one specifically. But what what problems as you think about deploying capital or investing into these these types of teams, these types of companies, what hurdles are you trying to reduce? Like, I'd love to... If... With the top few or the top couple that come to your mind, like, if Canton were to continue that strategy and there are companies out there building, like, what are these big hurdles or barriers right now that you're really excited for companies to go build **Yuval Rooz** (16:57) efficiencies around? Yeah. I wasn't kidding when you asked that question, saying that it's the most important question. I I I do truly think that... You know, it's extremely compelling when you look at some of the products out there that have a lot of retail excitement. I think that the risk though with that strategy is that, you know, the market can turn also very quick, as we've seen, you know, post October what happened to our market that is primarily driven by retail. The really nice thing about institutional is not that it cannot it cannot, you know, significantly go down. It's that just institutional players are much more stable and are much more, you know, susceptible to, you know, market moves. Right? So the repo market or the swaps market or the FX market is still going to tick pretty large volumes even if the market is down 10% or 15%. And therefore, you know, I think that the long term bet that we're making is that if we can convert those businesses first on Canton, we have a very interesting business proposition for token investors to invest in something that will have durability through the test of time. The downside of that is that onboarding institutional players is so much harder. And therefore, anything that helps the adoption by institutions **Host** (18:32) is something that is extremely compelling to us. I want I want to shift gears a little bit back into this, like, asset manager conversation. I saw you you were commenting on on X with Andy from the Rolep about asset managers, how they're thinking through composability with these assets on chain. I think this is especially relevant with the news with the DTCC, the token exemption. How do we think about managing these assets? Like, what what do... Why is composability so attractive, especially when it comes to going with, you know, money market funds, other assets? We've seen vaults kinda come and go. They've had their rise. I don't know if you'd say they had their fall, but there's, you know, there's people on both sides of the spectrum. How are asset managers approaching composability and and these assets on chain? Yeah. I mean, to me, composability **Yuval Rooz** (19:24) is really a very sophisticated word to say that you increase the utility of assets. Right? So just... I like to always try to explain things in kind of real world example, then kind of explain. So let's just say one of you have you know an equity portfolio that is worth a million dollars. And you now want to go and get a $500,000 loan against that portfolio. Generally speaking, when you think about it just purely from a loan originator perspective, that's not something that is very hard to do. Right? I have something that is worth that is pretty liquid, it's worth a million dollars. If you are defaulting on your loan, I just go and sell that portfolio, I pay your $500,000 loan back, and I give you whatever is left minus interest. Right? Like not that complicated. The reality though is that the financial system as it exists today is not really well connected between all of these ledgers. So when you start thinking about, well, what would it take me now to in practical term to underwrite this loan? Well, I now need to make sure that I can put a lien on your equity portfolio, meaning that you cannot sell it. I need to make sure that in case of a default, I can call on your portfolio. I now need to be able to... Like, all of those things, you know, that that I'm really compelling now in the real world as it is today becomes really complicated, and more importantly, really expensive. And then you start asking yourself, well, how much would it cost me to actually just administrate this loan? And you realize, oh, it's a lot of money. So for me now as a... As an underwriter to to say this loan is actually worth my time and business, I would have to give you such a high interest rate that that loan no longer becomes interesting to you. You're like, it's okay. I'll I'll go and figure it out somewhere else. That is the expense that exists in today's world as a result of lack of composability, meaning connecting assets to different services or to other assets is extremely expensive. So now you're saying, well, what if I can actually connect my equity portfolio to a loan vault or to other kind of lending services where I'm effectively... Everything that I describe about legal agreements, putting liens, all of those things, the cost of that effectively goes towards zero. That's what composability is. It's really asset connectivity or service connectivity, the cost of that goes down to zero. Well suddenly, every asset of value becomes something that you can borrow against. So the tan of the potential borrowing world goes up many x's, right? So the way we like to talk about it is composability increases the utility of assets. So if you think about like today money market funds is kind of like a sleepy product that gets used primarily by insurance companies, suddenly, you open the door that it's like, oh, wow. It becomes like the coolest product for treasury management, for example. Right? It's like it becomes a product for retail where every time I need to do a sweep of my cash balance, it goes into a money market fund. Why? Because it's a highly liquid, very safe, yield generating asset. So I think that composability, again, it's all about how do you increase the utility of assets. Yeah. And that's... You know, when we talk to asset managers, a lot of times we talk about, well, who are going to be these participants that would be really excited about using this product if it had these characteristics? I can move it twenty four seven. I can settle it in real time, I can liquidate it in real time, **Host** (23:22) suddenly your asset becomes much more sexy and interesting to a lot of other... A lot of other participants that today probably wouldn't even look at this product. It almost makes me feel like, oh, the OG, like, Acorns. Like, what Acorns was really trying to be for, like, consumers is, like, now just, like, blow that up, scale that up for institutions, and do it with with better tech. **Host** (23:42) Yuval, I I have one more question as we go. This Please don't hear. This is like a... This is not a gotcha question at all. **Yuval Rooz** (23:50) I've just been Gotcha. I don't have a lot, by the way. My own perspective... **Host** (23:54) Super honest, like my own perspective, sometimes I open x, I see people who interview you, I see things that people say about Canton, and they're just extremely negative. And they're just like... Seems like there's a chip on their shoulder for a reason that I completely don't don't understand. I text... I... I'm texting Ben Mill, and then I'm like, what the hell is going on? Like, why are people hating on Canton? And he's like, oh, it's just noise. Forget about it. Like, what what... Why... Like, what... I just wanna know from your perspective, like, where... Is that just hate... Like, haters gonna hate type stuff, or what do you think about that? Is there like wanna say to those winning is the best. I just don't understand personally. I look at what Canton's doing. I see what you guys are doing, and I'm like, how can you create FUD around the folk... Like, yeah, there's focus here, and there's, like, opinions. But I just wanted to ask you, like, what where is that coming from? Like, what are the haters... Like, what do they think is right that they might that they might be getting wrong in your view? What is that? **Yuval Rooz** (24:54) Yeah. So first of all, I I take it as a compliment. Right? I've learned I've learned any attention is good. So I always... When people hate on x, I always say thank you for the free advertisement. That, you know, you know, maybe a year ago when people did hate on Canton, lot of their replies were, what is Canton? And I was like, thank you. You brought Canton to the to the attention of a lot of other people. In all seriousness, last last week, I was at the Fed for a roundtable, and we cannot... We agreed there's not... We're not gonna to attribute. But someone actually said something that I think is true to some extent, which is if the Internet would... Had a token, today we would have had 30 Internets, but yet we have only one Internet. And I think that there's there's some legitimacy to that statement. And I think that when you look at... I always I always like to look when people put proper good good quality hate. I then just go and look at their timeline, and I see who are they not hating. And for the most part, it's another chain. And therefore I'm like, I'm okay with it. I mean, it's... You know, like I said, if we didn't do something right, I don't think people would even pay attention to us. So I take it that's fine. For the most part, the hate is we've announced some very big partnership. This industry have been going after the institutional use case for so long. And you know, we got selected by DTCC and now suddenly everybody's hating on us. I can promise you, oh, not only hating on us, hating on DTCC. I'm pretty sure that if DTCC were to choose their bag, suddenly DTCC would have been the hero. So Yeah. It's not it's not... I... Sometimes I actually... I do think that within the hate, there's actually good criticism. And I actually try to look at all the hate because I do find that there are some critical thinkers that actually put good criticism, and that is going to be a miss if we ignore all of it. But for the most part, I look at people that put the hate. You go look at their timeline, and then you're like, a second before the hate, they were hailing **Host** (27:17) some other Another... Yeah. Yeah. And it's It's almost like it's like it's like when Shohei Ohtani signed his multimillion dollar agreement with the Dodgers. All of a sudden, he's overrated. But when he's on the Angels, he's the best player, he's the next Babe Ruth. And it's like, hold on. I thought you just were praising him without all of sudden It's like the jersey the jersey signed all the... It's like we're just we're just cheering for jerseys. You know? Not cheering for people. We're just cheering the jerseys on. **Host** (27:41) Well, that's a good perspective. And I would love to hear more around like... I know we gotta wrap here, but it's it's a great perspective, and we love to highlight those differences unpack them. And so again, like when I see Canton and what you guys are doing, it does seem extremely unique and and worth coverage. And I think highlighting those differences is really key. So we'd love to have you back as always, and thank you for the Right. Thank you for the perspective today. Thank you. Thank you for having me. Be careful. See you. Cheers. Bye bye.