a16z crypto leads $355 million raise for Canton developer Digital Asset

Digital Asset, the company developing the Canton Network, has raised $355 million in a new funding round led by a16z crypto. 

The round was supported by a range of institutions across TradFi and DeFi, including an Abu Dhabi Investment Authority subsidiary, Apollo Funds, BNP Paribas, Broadridge, Citadel Securities, CME Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, Greenwulf Asset Management, Hanwha Investment & Securities, HSBC, Liberty City Ventures, Optiver, Polychain, S&P Global, SBI Group, SoFi, Tradeweb, and William Blair, among others. 

Many of these backers are new investors in Canton, Digital Asset CEO Yuval Rooz told The Block in an interview, noting they received equity rather than token allocations. Moreover, many of the backers are also prospective users of Canton, he said.

“When you look at these partners, there are quite significant opportunities that are going to be revealed later as a result of these partnerships,” Rooz said. “Now that we have a really good balance sheet, we can actually invest in these relationships to actually accelerate them moving onchain.”

Rooz said that Digital Asset is already profitable. Expanding the firm’s balance sheet gives it the “freedom to do M&A, to participate in interesting projects,” and to help its partners build onchain businesses, Rooz said, noting that he’s not interested in pursuing the type of circular investment strategies that “you see in crypto,” like pledging capital for their partners’ funds. 

Canton has become a breakout player in the institutional blockchain space. The network claims to have supported the issuance of $6 trillion in tokenized assets, and firms like JPMorgan and DTCC are building on the privacy-preserving network. Visa became a Canton Super Validator in March and added Canton to its stablecoin settlement pilot alongside networks like Base, Polygon, Arc, and Tempo.

Digital Asset, founded in 2014, designed Canton as a public, permissionless Layer 1 blockchain built with configurable privacy features aimed at institutional finance. The network supports applications written in Digital Asset's open-source smart contract language, Daml, and is designed to enable tokenized asset workflows across multiple parties while keeping transaction data confidential.

“Digital Asset has built one of the clearest examples of blockchain product-market fit in regulated finance,” a16z crypto General Partner Ali Yahya said in a statement. “We believe that Digital Asset is building foundational infrastructure for the next generation of financial markets.”

Of note, last month, Andreessen Horowitz announced it raised $2.2 billion for its fifth crypto fund. Bloomberg previously reported Digital Asset was raising capital from a16z at a $2 billion valuation.

Digital Asset already counts a number of big-name backers. In June 2025, DRW Venture Capital and Tradeweb Markets co-led a $135 million round with participation from Goldman Sachs, Citadel Securities, DTCC, and others. BNY Mellon, Nasdaq, S&P Global, and iCapital later supported a $50 million raise in December 2025.

“All of these relationships that you're seeing now — we have been very intentional on our go-to-market,” Rooz said. “We have been developing these relationships for many years.”