Most public blockchains broadcast everything.
A treasury sweep tells the market your corporate position. An onchain bilateral OTC trade hands your counterparty and strategy to anyone running a block explorer. While cross-border settlement leaks timing, routing, and amounts to any observer with the patience to watch.
For regulated institutions, that visibility kills the deal before it starts. It is the reason DTCC processed $4.7 quadrillion in securities transactions through traditional infrastructure in 2025, while the most valuable institutional flows have stayed offchain entirely… even as the rest of the financial stack moves toward tokenization.
In episode 5 of Quadrillions, a mini-series from Blockworks and Canton Network, we dive into the fragmentation of the stablecoin stack and why the winning rails are the ones users never see. For the full discussion, watch Episode 5 here.
Tokenization has stalled in pilots for this reason. The tech and economics work, and compliance frameworks have now caught up. But the moment an institutional payment hits a public ledger, it exposes the kind of competitive intelligence that banks, market makers, asset managers and other institutions can’t afford to give up.
Signal leakage, including positions, counterparty relationships, trading patterns, and more can become roadmaps that competitors trade against. Once a niche feature request, privacy is now a gate for the entire category.
The room to grow is enormous. Stablecoins now move roughly $30 billion in daily transaction volume, itself a tiny sliver of the trillions settled daily through traditional payment rails. Of that $30 billion, real-world payments account for only about 1%. The institutional volume that could close these gaps is still sitting on traditional rails, waiting on the privacy guarantees that make migration viable.
Each square represents one percent. Filled squares show what's already moved. Sources: McKinsey, BCG (2025).
For this reason, we built privacy into the protocol itself, nixing the need for retrofitted mixers, side-chains, or zero-knowledge bolt-ons. Thanks to subtransaction privacy, each participant sees their own leg of a settlement and nothing else. Unlike most other public chains, Validators only exchange transaction data with the counterparties directly involved.
The synchronizers that coordinate ordering route encrypted messages that they cannot decrypt and participants in one subnet see nothing of another.
This selective disclosure principle isn’t layered on top of the Canton Protocol. It is the protocol.
Canton solves the privacy problem. Onboarding institutions is the next problem.
HIFI is a payments infrastructure company. Its APIs move stablecoins across banks and blockchains, with the compliance and fiat connectivity institutions need to actually use them.
The Canton integration extends that surface to a privacy-preserving settlement layer without changing how developers integrate. You write no Daml contracts, run no validator nodes, and don’t need to manage an onchain state. Payments route through Canton the same way they route through any other network HIFI supports—through the same API, authorization model, and compliance controls.
For institutions, this eliminates the build-versus-buy decision that has kept numerous private-chain efforts in evaluation purgatory. Canton supplies the privacy guarantees at the protocol level, and HIFI supplies the application layer. One integration spans both, with no operational overhead to assemble them.
Four workflows open up immediately:
HIFI settles payments in USDCx, a USDC-backed stablecoin issued on Canton through Circle's xReserve facility. The stablecoin composes with other Canton applications and interoperates with USDC across supported chains while keeping Canton's privacy guarantees intact.
The workflows that have been hardest to bring onchain are the ones this integration helps enable.
Repo and collateral settlement only works if the securities and the cash move together (both clear, or neither does), with each side visible only to its counterparty. HIFI handles the cash side through fiat rails and stablecoin liquidity.
Programmable treasuries can set their own rules for moving money such as automatic transfers, payment conditions, and approval steps. Canton is the protocol that enforces these rules onchain without exposing the data.
Cross-border settlement runs without exposing counterparties, amounts, or routing. HIFI handles bank transfers on either side.
"Institutions require the ability to transact privately while maintaining the trust and controls expected in regulated markets. HIFI's private transaction capabilities on the Canton Network provide a framework for confidential, permissioned settlement between approved counterparties." — Sumitomo Corporation of America.
Public networks can move value. Few move it without exposing the flow, and even fewer pair institutional controls with the selective-disclosure model that regulated counterparties need before they commit meaningful volume.
Canton clears that bar in the protocol and HIFI lets institutions plug in through the API surface they already use for every other payment rail.
Figure: Correspondent banking takes many hops; Canton settles in one.
Foreign exchange is the bigger, more valuable goal. But it’s also more difficult to crack. Both see promise in fungibility between a local government bond and a local stablecoin, letting institutions rebalance and settle across currencies around the clock. That requires banks and large corporates onchain, and they will not surrender control of consensus, the ledger, or their data.
"These guys are not going to use a chain that they don't have control over the consensus." — Chris Maurice.
Privacy becomes essential here. In thin markets a few million dollars can move an exchange rate, so visible flows invite front-running of the local currency. Canton lets institutions interoperate while keeping positions and counterparties confidential, with regulators granted visibility where required.
For Maurice, that is close to the only credible path to FX onchain at scale.
Next in the series: Episode 6 we map the power shift from crypto building parallel markets to institutions integrating onchain rails into traditional finance.
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Quadrillions is a miniseries produced by Blockworks and sponsored by Canton Network. Listen to the full episode at quadrillionspod.com or click one of the links below.
Disclaimer: Nothing on this show is a recommendation to buy or sell securities or tokens. Views expressed are solely those of the guests.