Transforming Financial Market Infrastructure with Canton

Blockchain technology is emerging as key to the future of global financial market infrastructure, driving key innovations, from faster post-trade settlement and real-time cross-border payments to asset tokenisation of Real-World-Assets (RWA) such as bonds and funds.

Although these applications promise to deliver clear benefits such as accelerating and securing transactions, increasing trust and transparency and boosting liquidity, traditional finance (TradFi) firms will only fully adopt this technology at scale with institutional-grade solutions.

Public Blockchain Provides Value but Lacks Institutional Grade Features

Public blockchains such as Ethereum, Solana, and Avalanche have driven significant innovation in decentralised finance, enabling tokenised securities, stablecoins, cross-border payments and automated settlement pilots within traditional finance.

Major banks and asset managers are exploring public blockchains to leverage smart-contract capabilities to issue bank-backed stablecoins (Société Générale), facilitate cross-bank payments using deposit tokens (UBS, PostFinance, and Sygnum Bank), and create tokenized structured financial products (Amundi, DBS Bank). These initiatives are mostly in pilot or early production stages, reflecting active experimentation rather than full-scale mainstream deployment.

Although these are all promising developments, true transformation in financial markets requires more than just pilots, and despite the progress of public blockchains, the following limitations exist:

• Inherent transparency – Transaction details are visible to all participants, conflicting with the confidentiality requirements of regulated markets.
• Non-deterministic behaviour – Execution can be unpredictable, and smart contracts relying on external or inconsistent inputs can produce varying outcomes, making compliance and predictable results difficult.
• Immutability of public chains – Once recorded, transactions cannot be changed, which can complicate regulatory reporting, error correction, and dispute resolution.
• Variable Performance – This can be variable under network congestion, and integration with existing legacy systems often requires complex bridging solutions.

Serious capital market players with mission-critical applications need production-ready systems that provide privacy, control, regulatory alignment, interoperability, and predictable performance to support mainstream financial operations.

The Canton Network: Institutional Grade Blockchain

Regulated institutions demand a blockchain solution that retains the advantages of public blockchain, whilst also addressing the limitations; one such solution is the Canton Network – the first privacy-enabled open blockchain network.

Developed by Digital Asset, the Canton network is an institutional grade, private, interoperable blockchain, purpose-built for regulated financial institutions, allowing banks, asset managers, custodians and market participants to connect their own permissioned blockchain applications into a shared, synchronised network.

The Canton Network allows firms to maintain full control over data and governance while enabling atomic settlement, real-time reconciliation, and coordinated workflows across different ledgers — essentially providing a secure, institution grade “network of networks” to connect various independent applications built with the Daml smart contract language.

Why Canton Outperforms Public Blockchain for Regulated Finance

Being engineered specifically for secure, institutional-grade financial workflows, the Canton Network has the following key advantages:

• Privacy by Default – Provides fine-grained, sub-transaction privacy so parties see only the information relevant to them.
• Deterministic Finality – Offers immediate, fork-free finality — essential for settlement certainty
• Integrated Compliance Controls – Rights, permissions, and compliance rules are built directly into the contract model, protecting counterparty confidentiality.
• Cross-Application Interop with Privacy – Enables independent applications – e.g., payments, custody, trading – to synchronise workflows atomically, maintaining privacy across applications without revealing sensitive data.
• Predictable Performance, No Gas Fees – Performance optimised for institutional workloads; no congestion, volatile fees, or unpredictable transaction times.

Use-Cases: Tokenised Cash and Regulated Settlement, Built for Production

These properties make the Canton network particularly suitable for the following applications with traditional finance:

• Tokenised Cash Ledger — Institutions can issue and transact tokenised cash in a controlled environment with configurable minting, KYC/AML-based transfer policies, segmented visibility, and built-in compliance, enabling rapid, secure movement among approved participants.
• Tokenised Asset Lifecycle Management — Canton manages the full lifecycle of digital assets—bonds, fund units, or structured notes — covering issuance, transfers, instant settlement, automated events, permissions, and selective visibility, giving institutions a scalable, end-to-end framework.
• Atomic Delivery-vs-Payment (DvP) Settlement — Canton enables real-time, atomic settlement of cash and assets without batch cycles or manual reconciliation, preserving privacy and unlocking continuous, secure market settlement.
• Compliance and Regulatory Alignment — Built-in compliance enforces KYC/AML, jurisdictional restrictions, investment limits, and regulator access, ensuring every action aligns automatically with policies and regulations.

The Future Rails of Capital Markets Infrastructure

The Canton Network is a leading player for institutional grade blockchain applications, helping to build a future of 24/7 on-chain capital markets and payments with institutional grade privacy.

Many firms are realising this and accelerating their adoption of this technology to modernise their financial market infrastructure, keep up with agile competitors and unlock new revenue opportunities.  

Yet integration barriers exist and whilst many other firms wish to participate, they do not have expertise in the blockchain domain. Still others wish to focus less on critical — but non-differentiating — integration efforts, and more on the future value they will bring with their on-chain applications.

This is where the Rapid Addition & Tradingstack.io partnership can help. By leveraging RA’s deep experience in institutional grade FIX integration and trading ecosystem interoperability and Tradingstack.io’s broad expertise in the digital assets space, we offer traditional finance firms an opportunity to interact with the Canton Network.

From accessing the Canton Network’s liquidity and atomic settlement benefits via purpose-built APIs, to hosting a Canton Participant Node in order to issue tokenised RWAs to the market, we can help.

Please reach out to us to discuss how we can support your future integration with this exciting and pivotal blockchain technology.

The Partnership:

The partnership between Tradingstack.io and Rapid Addition seeks to bridge the gap between digital assets and traditional markets. By enabling institutions to access digital asset markets through existing financial market infrastructure, we help reduce integration cost and complexity, while improving time-to-market. The collaboration integrates the native digital assets infrastructure and domain expertise of TradingStack with Rapid Addition’s established counterparty connectivity solutions and FIX domain leadership, delivering network effects that expand liquidity and hasten adoption. Together, we can help our customers drive cross-asset innovation and create hybrid products that enable new revenue opportunities, strengthen compliance, and achieve cost efficiency.