Stabledash Live · · 28 min
Canton Network Bets on Institutions: What It Takes to Move Them Onchain
With 
Yuval Rooz, Digital Asset
Key takeaways
Digital Asset closed a $355 million round led by a16z, while Visa became a super validator and DTCC selected Canton Network for its tokenization infrastructure.
Yuval Rooz says Broadridge repo grew from $1.5 trillion to $7-9 trillion a month in about two years, and he expects about $50 trillion of monthly value moving within two to three years.
Rooz argues treasury management is a near-term case, with companies able to generate about $35M EBITDA a year per billion moved into tokenized money market funds.
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Summary
Yuval Rooz says excitement about onchain finance runs high, but institutional deployment is still in the first or second inning.
Digital Asset has closed a $355 million funding round led by a16z. The company behind Canton Network also brought Visa on as a super validator, and DTCC selected Canton Network for its tokenization infrastructure. Co-founder and CEO Yuval Rooz says the work now is moving institutions onchain.
Early innings
Yuval Rooz puts the industry's willingness and excitement at seven to nine out of ten, but its progress at the first to second inning. He says activity onchain is still primarily retail driven, and that the institutional user experience remains very complicated. Digital Asset has invested in a company trying to streamline that experience for institutional customers.
“When people hate on x, I always say thank you for the free advertisement”
Yuval RoozRepo as the yardstick
Rooz points to Broadridge, which he says went from $1.5 trillion of repo a month to $7-9 trillion in about two years. He says the industry should try to double or quadruple monthly activity every couple of years, and expects Canton Network to approach $50 trillion of monthly value within two to three years. He adds that repo, swaps and FX markets still trade large volumes even when markets are down 10% or 15%.
Treasury without seed phrases
According to Yuval Rooz, any billion dollars of cash a company converts into a money market fund can generate about $35M EBITDA a year. Canton Network is being integrated into a treasury management company serving roughly 4,000 corporates, with a first client he calls very exciting. Rooz says wallets and seed phrases are a barrier, since getting them wrong could lose all the money for the corporate.
Composability and critics
Rooz describes composability as asset or service connectivity whose cost goes toward zero. In his example, a detailed equity portfolio that once took weeks of legal work to pledge as collateral can move in seconds when the lender reads the same ledger. On criticism, Yuval Rooz says he thanks detractors for the free advertising, and argues that if the internet had a token, there would be 30 internets instead of one.
Fresh capital and backing from Visa and DTCC give Canton Network institutional credibility. By Yuval Rooz's own account, though, the growth he expects depends on making the network simple enough for corporates to adopt, and he puts the industry only in its first or second inning.
DTCC, Coinbase, Acorns, and Broadridge come up most.
- People
- Yuval Rooz
- Andy
- Ben Millen
- Companies
- DTCC
- Coinbase
- Digital Asset
- Acorns
- Broadridge
- Visa Inc
- NASDAQ
- Canton Network
- a16z crypto
- Dfns
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