Dfns Secures $16M Series A Funding – See the Full Announcement

Product

Canton Tier 2 Support

Noah Cornwell
Noah Cornwell
February 12, 2025
Read time:

Dfns is the first institutional-grade wallet provider to support Canton Network, enabling secure Canton Coin transactions and paving the way for broader institutional adoption of onchain finance.

This integration, currently at Tier 2, enables the transfer and indexing of Canton Coin, the native utility token of the network. As finance explores digital asset infrastructure, Canton stands out as an innovative network purpose-built for regulated institutions and institutional-grade real-world assets and is supported by industry giants like Broadridge, DRW, Cumberland, Circle, Goldman Sachs, HSBC, and many others.

What is the Canton blockchain?

Canton is a smart contract “network of networks” designed to bring the benefits of distributed ledger technology (DLT) to financial markets while overcoming the privacy and control limitations of other public blockchains. Originally launched by New York-based Digital Asset, Canton has evolved into a decentralized public network with independent governance. It connects interoperable permissioned blockchains, tokenized assets, and cash, enabling financial institutions and institutional crypto markets to use decentralized infrastructure and privacy-enhanced assets onchain, without sacrificing compliance or scalability.

Unlike other public blockchains like Ethereum, Canton is designed for institutions, offering predictable execution, sovereign control over assets and applications, as well as seamless real-world asset integration. Canton uses Daml, an open-source smart contract language built for secure, privacy-preserving financial applications. Digital Asset also provides asset tokenization tools to simplify access to the ecosystem. With Daml and Canton, institutions can create smart contracts that work across multiple blockchains while ensuring data confidentiality, governance, and atomic finality. As its ecosystem grows, Canton stands out for its focus on privacy, scalability, compliance, and developer tools, making it a strong choice for institutional finance and the integration of onchain capital markets and payments.

Ethereum and other public blockchains have fueled innovation in decentralized finance and smart contracts. But their limitations make them less suitable for regulated financial institutions:

  • Privacy and confidentiality: Ethereum’s smart contracts run on a public ledger, exposing transaction data to everyone. Canton restricts access to permissioned participants, ensuring confidentiality for institutional use.
  • Regulatory compliance: Canton allows institutions to control transaction visibility, participant identity, and asset custody, enabling compliance with jurisdictional regulations.
  • Interoperability without fragmentation: Public blockchains often struggle with interoperability, leading to fragmented liquidity and inefficiencies. Canton seamlessly connects private blockchains while maintaining data consistency and governance.
  • Scalability and predictable finality: Public blockchains rely on probabilistic finality through mining or staking. Canton provides deterministic finality with a clear settlement framework, offering financial institutions greater predictability.

Dfns integrates Canton as a Tier 2 blockchain

Dfns now supports Canton’s native coin, offering:

  • Balance tracking: Wallets can detect and display Canton Coin balances.
  • Basic transactions: Generate signatures, transfer Canton Coin, and broadcast transactions securely both via API and dashboard.

Since this is a Tier 2 integration, advanced features like auto-detection of additional assets, on-chain transfer history, and webhooks are not yet available. These will come with the Tier 1 integration next month, expanding functionality to include:

  • Webhooks for real-time transaction monitoring
  • Full indexing of the Global Synchronizer run by The Linux Foundation
  • Support for stablecoins and tokenized assets issued on Canton

With these upgrades, Dfns-powered wallets will enable smooth asset transfers within the Canton ecosystem. Financial institutions can now manage Canton Coin alongside stablecoins and tokenized assets, including those from Brale. As the first institutional-grade wallets-as-a-service platform to support Canton, Dfns is showing its level of commitment to security, compliance, and interoperability in finance.

Sign up and get started with Canton today: app.dfns.io/get-started

Authors