What It Takes to Support Regulated Finance on Canton

Regulated financial markets did not avoid public blockchains because they were slow to understand the technology. It’s because the technology was not yet ready to meet their needs. A bank cannot run competitively sensitive positions and flows across a network where every participant sees every transaction. A broker-dealer cannot easily settle on infrastructure with no control over who participates and no clear answers on finality or governance. So trillions of dollars in traditional assets have been waiting in the wings to be brought onchain, but real solutions are finally emerging. One of the most promising solutions is the Canton network, paired with the institutional-grade wallet infrastructure Fireblocks provides.

A Network Designed For Institutions

Canton takes a different approach than most public blockchains. Transaction visibility is highly configurable and scoped to the parties involved, so a trade between two institutions is visible only to those who need to see it rather than being broadcast to the world. While the network is open to anyone, institutions have complete control over the permissioning, privacy, and governance of their applications on the network, enabling institutions like Goldman Sachs, BNP Paribas, Deutsche Börse, Tradeweb, and Euroclear to get the velocity of a public blockchain without giving up the control they require. Most importantly, settlement is atomic across applications. When one side delivers an asset and the other delivers payment, both movements complete together as a single transaction, or neither happens. There is no window where you have paid and your counterparty has not.

From a practical perspective, this approach means that the world’s most trusted assets, from US Treasuries to equities, can exist in tokenized form while keeping the investor protections and ownership rights that make them trusted in the first place.

Just last week, DTCC processed real US trades using tokenized assets held at DTC, in what it describes as the largest tokenization production initiative to date, spanning collateral pledges, repo and equity settlement, and CCP margin workflows. Canton’s creator Digital Asset and Fireblocks are among the participating firms.

The Essential Infrastructure That Makes It Usable

None of this works unless institutions can actually hold, govern, and transact these assets with the controls their risk and compliance teams require. That is the infrastructure Fireblocks provides, and we have been shipping it for Canton since February 2026, steadily deepening this support over the last several months. Today, we support:

• Canton wallets with full custody support, with in-house validator nodes running in two regions, disaster recovery, and transaction visibility through the Cantonscan explorer
• Interoperability with standard compatible wallets and decentralized applications (CIP-0103) such as the Digital Asset Registry app, which supports assets used in over 1.5M daily transactions on the network
• Native Canton Coin transfers via the CIP-056 token standard
• USDC on Canton, available out-of-the-box on Fireblocks workspaces
• Self-serve listing for any Canton token-standard compliant asset, so customers can add tokens like USYC without waiting on an engineering roadmap
• Two-step transaction flows, where an incoming transfer arrives as an offer the receiving institution explicitly accepts, alongside the default pre-approval mechanism
• Bring Your Own Validator, connecting a customer’s own Canton validator node to Fireblocks for signing and custody
• Canton contract calls, so institutions can act on Daml smart contracts directly from Fireblocks: settling DVP trades, pledging collateral, running a repo from proposal through close, allocating assets to settlement obligations, and setting standing pre-approvals

Canton contract call support is an especially important piece to the puzzle. Canton’s Daml contract model is different from the account-based chains most wallet infrastructure is built for, and contract calls are where institutional workflows actually live.

Issuance is getting simpler too. Digital Asset’s newly released Digital Asset Registry, the tokenization launchpad already used by more than 35 platforms and issuers, connects assets to Fireblocks out of the box. An issuer bringing a stablecoin, tokenized deposit, or money market fund to Canton through DA Registry has institutional custody and policy controls available from day one, with no integration project in between.

Fireblocks continues to deepen its support for Canton. In the months ahead, institutions that want dedicated node infrastructure without operating it themselves will be able to use managed, dedicated validators, hosted by Fireblocks on the customer’s behalf. 

Questions to Ask Any Wallet Provider

Canton’s architecture is fundamentally different from the EVM world, and any wallet infrastructure that provides only thin adaptations will show its seams under institutional load. Some institutions doing provider due diligence are discovering that gap the hard way. A few questions will surface it quickly:

• Can the provider execute Canton contract calls, or only hold assets? Custody without Daml contract call support means you can own an asset on Canton and do very little with it.
• Is there a path from the provider’s validator infrastructure to your own? Institutions increasingly require dedicated nodes, and migration can be painful
• Do policy and governance controls apply to Canton transactions the same way they apply across the rest of your stack?
• Does “Canton support” mean the token standard, or one token?

Fireblocks builds with all these questions in mind so we can consistently support our most ambitious customers ahead of where most of the market is.

Talk to us if your institution is participating in DTCC’s Tokenization Service, already building on Canton, or still deciding. Our Canton support documentation covers the full capability set, and our team can walk through how it maps to your workflows.