Digital Asset Holdings, the company behind the institutional blockchain Canton Network, is seeking to raise approximately $300 million at a valuation of around $2 billion, Bloomberg reported on May 10, citing people familiar with the matter.
The round is being led by Andreessen Horowitz’s a16z crypto and is expected to close within the coming weeks, though the final figure could still change.
The financing would be the largest in Digital Asset’s history, more than doubling the $135 million it raised in June 2025 in a round led by DRW Venture Capital and Tradeweb Markets.
That round drew participation from Goldman Sachs, Citadel Securities, and DTCC. A subsequent $50 million raise in December 2025 attracted investment from BNY Mellon, Nasdaq, S&P Global, and iCapital.
Canton is a public, permissionless layer-1 blockchain built with configurable privacy features designed for institutional finance. It runs smart contracts written in Daml, Digital Asset’s open-source programming language.
The network is structured to enable tokenized asset workflows across multiple counterparties while keeping individual transaction data confidential. More than $6 trillion in tokenized assets have been issued or processed on the network to date.
Institutional participation has expanded over the past year. Visa joined as a Canton Super Validator in March 2026, marking the payments company’s first participation in blockchain governance. Visa was added to a Canton stablecoin settlement pilot in late April 2026, alongside Base, Polygon, Arc, and Tempo.
Beyond its core institutional base, Canton has attracted broader activity. In November 2025, a company then listed on Nasdaq as Tharimmune, later renamed Canton Strategic Holdings, raised $540 million to build a Canton Coin treasury, with backing from DRW, ARK Invest, and Kraken.
In March 2026, a project called Zenith completed atomic swaps between Canton and an EVM-compatible environment, opening the potential for a bridge to the Ethereum developer ecosystem.
The investment would follow a16z crypto’s May 5 announcement of a $2.2 billion crypto fund, bringing the firm’s total dedicated crypto capital to approximately $10 billion across five vehicles.
General partner Ali Yahya wrote in January 2026 that privacy is the critical missing feature preventing global finance from fully moving on-chain.
That thesis aligns directly with Canton’s protocol-level confidentiality design, which its backers argue is essential for institutions with trade secrets to participate in public blockchain networks.
Quarterly crypto venture deal counts dropped to 97 in Q1 2026 from 427 in the same period a year earlier, according to The Block. Large funds continue to close substantial raises even as overall deal activity declines.
Some historically active crypto investors have shifted focus toward AI and robotics, Bloomberg noted in its May 10 report.
Source: X.com
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