Thoughts on the Canton Network project in the RWA (Real-World Assets) track

Author: Haotian; Source: X, @tmel0211

Recently, Canton Network has been a hot topic in the RWA (Real-World Asset) space. With $135 million in funding backed by Wall Street giants like Goldman Sachs, HSBC, and DTCC, it claims to be building a “global financial operating system.” Is this another legendary Wall Street narrative project? Let’s discuss my thoughts:

1) Canton is indeed different from most RWA projects out there. Typically, RWA in the market still revolves around synthetic assets. The issuers are traditional financial intermediaries, and on-chain, it’s just a layer wrapped in blockchain technology—essentially, transferring off-chain assets onto the chain via mapping mechanisms.

Canton’s approach is quite different: it enables asset issuers at the source to directly issue assets natively on the blockchain. What does that mean? For example, DTCC (the U.S. securities depository and clearinghouse) can directly issue U.S. Treasuries on Canton. The smart contract itself acts as a legal contract, establishing a direct contractual relationship between buyer and issuer, eliminating middlemen and their profit margins.

This isn’t just “tokenization,” but “native issuance.” While it might sound like just a different way of saying the same thing, the underlying logic is fundamentally different. Currently, over $12 billion of regulated assets have been issued natively on Canton, including bonds, money market funds, and alternative investment funds.

2) Let’s talk about their focus on “institutional privacy.” Recently, Zcash’s secondary performance has sparked renewed interest in privacy-focused projects. But honestly, Canton’s privacy features are somewhat different.

Zcash targets public payment scenarios, emphasizing “optional privacy,” where users can choose to be anonymous or transparent. Canton, on the other hand, targets regulated institutional transactions, emphasizing “selective visibility/conditional disclosure.” Parties keep their information confidential, but regulators can audit at any time, ensuring full traceability for compliance and enforcement.

This design is tailored to fit regulatory frameworks like SEC, EU, GDPR. In short, it aims to balance privacy and compliance—privacy when needed, but transparency when required.

3) What’s the current adoption status of Canton? So far, Canton has 28,000 registered wallets, mainly institutional accounts. Looking at this number, it’s clear: Canton is a B2B infrastructure platform for institutions, still a long way from large-scale consumer applications.

This shows the Canton team knows what they’re doing: first, they focus on building robust institutional-grade infrastructure, then extend to C-end applications. This approach is quite smart.

Why? Because the institutional market is a scarce resource—high barriers to entry, deep relationships, strict regulatory requirements—making it a real moat for the project. By targeting B2B first and then expanding to C-end, it’s essentially a strategy of “reducing dimensions” to attack more manageable segments. Under this strategy, Canton’s ecosystem activity has recently started to pick up.

Of course, even so, the narrative ceiling for Canton will likely be limited by “institutional adoption” for quite some time. When we speculate on crypto or ecosystem growth, we must understand where the project’s ceiling truly lies. Clearly, Canton’s value growth curve will be slow but steady, driven by “institutional adoption.”

That’s my take.

In summary, I believe Canton represents a relatively pragmatic direction within the RWA space. But how far it can go depends on two variables: one, the pace of regulatory evolution; two, whether traditional financial giants are willing to embrace on-chain solutions.