Canton Network Advances Tokenized Cross-Border Collateral
The Canton Network's industry working group has advanced the use of its permissioned blockchain for cross-border collateral mobility. By tokenizing assets, the initiative aims to enable programmable settlement and solve for the slow, fragmented movement of collateral in wholesale finance. The project includes participation from major banks, custodians, and fintechs.
- The project's fourth set of transactions marked the first time tokenized gilts (UK government bonds) were used for cross-border intraday repo, including the first cross-currency repo using tokenized gilts against non-GBP tokenized deposits. - Participants in this phase of the initiative include LSEG (London Stock Exchange Group), Euroclear, Citadel Securities, The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC), and Societe Generale, with regulated digital asset firm Archax joining as a new member. - The underlying technology is provided by Digital Asset, which created the Canton Network as a public-permissioned blockchain using the Daml smart contract language to ensure transaction-level privacy for institutions. - A prior, larger-scale pilot on the network involved 155 participants from 45 firms including Goldman Sachs and BNY Mellon, who successfully demonstrated over 350 simulated atomic transactions across 22 different distributed ledger applications. - Traditional cross-border collateral management is often hampered by differing settlement times, manual processes, and fragmented systems, which can lead to settlement fails and increased counterparty risk—issues tokenization aims to solve. - Governance of the network is handled by the independent, non-profit Canton Foundation, whose members include Digital Asset, BNP Paribas, DTCC, Euroclear, and SBI Digital Asset Holdings, ensuring no single entity controls the infrastructure. - The Canton Network is designed as a "network of networks," allowing financial institutions to connect their siloed systems and achieve real-time synchronization and settlement without sacrificing data control or privacy. - Digital Asset, the core technology provider, raised $135 million in a 2025 funding round led by DRW Venture Capital and Tradeweb Markets, with participation from DTCC, Goldman Sachs, and Citadel Securities to accelerate the network's adoption.
