The blockchain ecosystem is home to several very successful intelligent contract protocols, making it highly competitive for newcomers to enter.

Canton Network is one of the latest “next-generation layers” competing for users and capital with incumbents such as Ethereum and Solana. Together with SUI and Aptos, Canton’s development challenges the assumption that we have too many blockchains.

Rise @CantonNetwork it may seem quick, but it was a decade in the making. Ten years of learning from the mistakes of others…@gazza_jenkos and I talk to the co-founder and CEO of Digital Asset, @YuvalRoozto hear the story of Canton’s founding.https://t.co/6koyyOsnht

— Robert Baggs (@rkbaggs) November 24, 2025

I only talk to Cointelegraph’s daily Chain Reaction showYuval Rooz, co-founder of Digital Asset, told the story of Canton Network, which abandoned its Initial Coin Offering (ICO) during its ten-year development journey to where it is today.

“Our diploma thesis focused on servicing large institutions. We were very patient. We refused to conduct an ICO. We refuse to perform initial token mining. We really thought about tokenomics,” Rooz told Cointelegraph.

“Every time we thought we were ready, someone else made a mistake. We wondered what would happen if we made that mistake? It wouldn’t be good.”

The Canton Network is designed with financial institutions in mind, enabling secure, interoperable and privacy-preserving transactions. Digital Asset, the company that created Canton Network, describes the protocol’s architecture as a “network of networks” intended to tokenize, trade and settle real-world assets.

The protocol and its native token made headlines in 2025. Digital asset closed $135 million in financing round in June to continue growing the Canton ecosystem and lead the protocol’s RWA tokenization.

Then came the biotech company Tharimmune, which raised $540 million in private financing to build the Canton Coin (CC) digital asset vault. DAT plans to use the proceeds to acquire and stake CC tokens as a super validator of the network.

Related: Tharimmune bets $540 million on Canton Coin as part of crypto treasury push

Slow and steady wins the race

As Rooz explained, Digital Asset has taken a measured approach to the development and implementation of the Canton Network. In 2020, a licensed network was launched to assess the network’s performance and users’ expectations and needs in terms of functionality:

“It took about four years to build maybe the first version of the ledger, and then it took another two to three years to get to the point where we were comfortable running it without permission.”

Rooz said developers have learned a lot from the launches of other Layer 1 protocols, as well as from the early troubles of established players like Ethereum.

“Here’s the challenge that I think people underestimate. Once you launch a public network and there are a lot of wizards running in production, it’s extremely challenging to change it later. I think it’s going to be extremely challenging for permissionless public networks to take care of privacy in a way that works as an afterthought without causing a huge amount of pain to the community,” Rooz said.

Privacy on a need-to-know basis.

Privacy has been an important topic in the cryptocurrency space, with protocols like Zcash attracting a significant amount of opinion and attention.

Rooz said it was a positive development that the industry finally spoke out about the need for privacy in communications and transactions. However, the reality is that in recent years, many people have not been too concerned about this aspect of blockchain functionality.

“I can tell you that every time over the last decade we talked to crypto people and said privacy is a necessity, they told us, ‘you don’t understand crypto.’ The whole idea of ​​cryptocurrencies is not to ensure privacy,” Rooz said.

Digital Asset’s CEO added that privacy ultimately comes in “many shapes and forms.” The zero-knowledge cryptography on which both Zcash and Canton are based focuses more on anonymity than privacy.

“ZK comes from a world where people say you really want to have an onchain user experience of strenuous cash, a bearer instrument, which means no one will know what assets you have. I think that’s an engaging point of view. It’s very different from Bitcoin,” Rooz said.

From a regulatory perspective, financial institutions and authorities must monitor activities to comply with Know Your Customer and Anti-Money Laundering standards.

“I think Canton is different from Zcash in that Canton’s privacy model is based on the ability to share information on a need-to-know basis. That means if you’re a regulator, you can go to a stablecoin issuer and say, ‘hey, I want to see all of Yuval’s activity,’ which is different from anonymity.”

Digital Asset has received support from major players in the global financial space. BNP Paribas, Circle Ventures, Citadel Securities, Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation (DTCC) and Goldman Sachs were among the top investors in the 2025 fundraising round.

Warehouse: 2026 is the year of pragmatic privacy in cryptocurrencies: Canton, Zcash and more