Knova's Natalya Thakur on Canton, the 90/10 Split, and the Palantir Play for Institutions

Operationalizing Canton

Thakur says Knova gives clients a normalized toolkit, so a single REST API call covers Canton operations, with support for DAML smart contract development, party provisioning and key management. She says early Canton pilots moved around a thousand dollars, but the network wants people to put real money on its systems.

Timing matters for rewards. Thakur says Canton super validators have committee-approved milestones they must hit within a set period, and their payouts are exponentially higher. She counts 52 super validators out of 700 total. According to her, DRW helps select validators put together super validator applications. Knova also partners with AWS, DRW and other large institutions.

The 90/10 split

Thakur says institutions that try to build everything in-house often come back after four or five months having done little. Her answer is a 90/10 split: 90% is work like asset normalization, and the 10% is where firms differentiate. She cites McKinsey figures showing that institutions using modern modular infrastructure for the 90% reach market 20 to 50% faster.

A control plane, not a replacement

Thakur describes Knova as an on-prem product that works alongside existing back office systems with any vendor, and as a control plane that translates workflows into a common language. She says the company wants to become a Palantir for financial institutions adopting digital assets.

She sees vaults as an emerging trend, but says the hard part is everything around the vault, which she calls an infrastructure problem. She expects stablecoin and vault strategies to start to intersect, which will require a unified operational layer.