Canton Network
Sector: Tertiary sector · Industry: Fintech · Organisation: Digital Asset (Entwickler der Daml Smart Contract Plattform und des Canton Protokolls) · Maturity level: Production
Canton Network is a blockchain protocol solution by Digital Asset that connects Daml smart contract applications across organizational boundaries while ensuring privacy, control, and interoperability. The network currently manages over $6 trillion in on-chain real-world assets and comprises nearly 600 participants from the financial industry. The financial infrastructure processes over $1.5 trillion annually through the Canton Network and enables faster settlements and improved risk management.
Documentation status
- Project status: Production
- Evidence: Evidence high
- Editorial review: Ufuk Avci, 15 April 2026
Description
The Canton Network was developed by Digital Asset, the company behind DAML (Digital Asset Modeling Language), the first smart contract language specifically designed for institutional financial applications. Canton enables privacy-enabled, synchronised settlement across different financial institutions: each party sees only the data relevant to them, but all can verify the integrity of the overall system.
Digital Asset was founded in 2014 and built DAML as a type-safe smart contract language for finance. The Canton Network is the decentralised production network connecting DAML applications of various institutions. The core problem: financial market settlement today takes T+1 to T+2 and requires complex reconciliations between custodian banks, clearing houses and counterparties. Canton enables atomic, simultaneous settlement: the cash leg and the securities leg of a transaction occur simultaneously — no leg risk. In 2023, Canton launched a publicly documented pilot project with over 30 institutions: Goldman Sachs, BNP Paribas, Deloitte, Microsoft, Broadridge, Paxos, SBI Digital Asset Holdings and others. Result: 350+ transactions over tokenised assets successfully simulated. Privacy-by-design through DAML: each party sees only the parts of the contract that concern them — critical for institutional compliance.
Perspectives
B2B — organisations perspective
Banks and brokers can settle tokenised securities, repos and derivatives in real time and atomically via Canton — without T+1/T+2 delays, without manual reconciliations between custodian banks, and with full data privacy compliance.
B2C — consumers perspective
End customers indirectly benefit from faster settlement times and reduced costs realised by financial institutions through the Canton Network. The expanded investor access also enables smaller investors to benefit from institutional financial products that were previously only accessible to large investors.
Employees perspective
Employees in financial institutions benefit from the automation of recurring manual reconciliation processes and can focus on more strategic tasks. At the same time, they need to develop new skills in blockchain technology and particularly DAML programming to effectively use and configure the systems.
Benefits
General
- The platform enables secure interoperability between different financial market infrastructures without disclosing sensitive corporate data.
- Automated smart contracts significantly reduce manual processes and associated sources of error.
- The decentralised architecture eliminates single points of failure and increases system stability.
B2B — organisations
- Companies can reduce settlement times from days to minutes while automatically enforcing compliance requirements.
Employees
- Employees are relieved from time-consuming manual reconciliation tasks and can focus on more value-adding activities.
Challenges
General
- Implementation requires specialised knowledge in DAML programming and the Canton protocol, which can lead to staff shortages.
- The system introduces new specific security risks such as conservation violations and temporal ordering issues, which require specialised security tools.
B2B — organisations
- Integration with existing legacy systems can be complex and time-consuming, especially for established financial institutions with mature IT landscapes.
Employees
- Employees must undergo extensive training in new technologies and fundamentally adapt their ways of working.
Technology foundation
The Canton Network is based on a proprietary blockchain protocol that uses the DAML smart contract language and implements an extended UTXO model with encrypted transaction views. Unlike Ethereum-based systems, this architecture eliminates vulnerability classes such as reentrancy attacks and MEV extraction due to the absence of a public mempool.
Implementation examples
Goldman Sachs GS DAP
Goldman Sachs wanted to increase the efficiency of securities settlement while simultaneously reducing counterparty risks. The traditional manual processes led to longer settlement times and higher operational costs.
Goldman Sachs developed the GS DAP platform based on Daml and the Canton Network and has been operating it in production since January 2023.
Goldman Sachs' GS DAP platform uses Daml Smart Contracts and the Canton Network for the settlement of institutional financial transactions. The implementation enables faster buyer-seller matching, accelerated settlements, and increased liquidity for institutional clients. Since going live in January 2023, the platform has demonstrated concrete improvements in risk management and expanded investor access to institutional financial products.
The solution automates complex reconciliation processes between different parties and eliminates time-consuming manual validations. Programmable enforcement of business rules reduces compliance risks and increases transparency for all participants.
Tags
Interoperability, Smart Contracts, Securities Settlement, Institutional Finance, Privacy-by-Design