Canton Network is the public L1 blockchain purpose-built for institutions, uniquely providing privacy-preserving workflows that enables crypto capital markets to scale. Today, it quietly underpins over $280B in avg. daily on-chain repo transactions and $6T in real-world assets for world leading financial institutions. 

With a deep and diversified liquidity pool - from on-chain treasuries and stablecoins, to tokenized money market funds and wrapped Bitcoin - Canton empowers institutions to combine the composability and asset mobility of decentralized finance, with the regulatory guardrails and high quality asset pools of traditional markets. Because of this, Canton is fast becoming the venue to deliver on the promise of 24/7 liquidity and financing, on-chain collateral mobility and instant, cross-border treasury and payment workflows. 

But what makes this possible?

At the core of Canton Network lies an important building block designed specifically to issue, represent and manage assets that compose seamlessly, and meet the demands of regulators: Canton’s CIP-56 token standard.

What is CIP-56?

CIP-56 is a token interface standard that defines how on-chain assets are presented and managed on Canton Network, standardizing how tokens securely move between participants. It is Canton’s counterpart to Ethereum’s ERC-20, covering all the features of ERC-20 standard, but upgraded for the needs of regulated institutions and assets.

Just like ERC-20, CIP-56 covers basic token operations:

• Querying balances
• Transferring tokens
• Querying transaction history

But CIP-56 has additional advanced features that makes it suitable for regulated institutional workflows, such as:

• Privacy-preserving balance and transaction management
• Native support for multi-step transfers, which enable:
  • Token admins to control who transfers assets to whom
  • Receivers to control from whom they receive assets
• Native support for Atomic Delivery-vs-Payment (DvP) settlement

These enhancements are critical in enabling real-world assets to move compliantly on-chain, while still benefitting from composability. 

Why CIP-56?

As the Canton ecosystem has grown - with a wide range of asset issuers, custodians, and applications - standardization ensures seamless interoperability as the network scales. CIP-56 enables:

1. Native institutional workflows with built-in privacy and compliance
   • Privacy: information about asset holdings and transfers is shared on a need-to-know basis
   • Control: asset registries have full control over the structure of the workflows governing asset holdings and transfers
2. Composable registries, assets and applications
   • Any asset that follows CIP-56 standard can easily be managed using wallets supporting CIP-56, and used in applications built using CIP-56
3. Enhanced user experience

• Users will be able to view portfolio balances and transaction history from a unified user interface

Broad ecosystem support for CIP-56

Leading institutions are already adopting the standard to maintain seamless application composability across the network. From wallet infrastructure providers to token issuers and liquidity providers, CIP-56 is powering interoperable digital assets for 24/7 internet capital markets:

• Dfns employs the CIP-56 token standard for its wallet-as-a-service platform on Canton Network, enabling institutions to securely custody, transfer, and report Canton Coins. By following the token standard, Dfns enables live token balances, indexed real-time transaction histories, delegated transfers and token transfers to be approved/rejected based on business logic, and more.
• CantonSwap, a decentralized liquidity provider, adopted the CIP-56 token standard to facilitate and execute multi-asset, multi-leg trades fully atomically on-chain. This enabled the first seamless swap between Canton Coin and CBTC - both CIP-56 compliant tokens. By adopting the standard, CantonSwap ensured interoperability and eliminated the need for custom token integrations.
  • “As a founding Super Validator of the Canton Network, Obsidian builds for interconnected networks that scale without compromising Canton's unique privacy properties - which is why CantonSwap implements the Canton Network Token Standard (CIP-0056). What's cool is we proved it works with the first-ever Canton Coin and CBTC atomic swap trade, built by BitSafe, demonstrating true interoperability across different token implementations. This isn't just a token swap; it's foundational infrastructure for transaction flow, with more features coming as we build toward 24x7 liquid market.” Ryan Trinkle, Co-Founder, CantonSwap and Partner at Obsidian Systems
• Bitsafe adopted the CIP-56 token standard for CBTC, bringing wrapped Bitcoin to Canton, enabling seamless interoperability across applications and wallets on the Canton Network. By aligning with the standard, Bitsafe ensures that CBTC can be securely transferred, custodied, and integrated within the broader Canton ecosystem.
  • “The Canton CIP-56 token standard ensures that compatible tokens - including our decentrally wrapped Bitcoin token, CBTC - can be used seamlessly across wallets and applications on the Canton Network. This makes it possible for us to reach retail users through public channels, while those users can also access apps within Canton that leverage the network’s privacy features. All of this interoperability is enabled by the token standard itself, without requiring custom integrations.” Jesse Eisenberg, Co-Founder & CTO at Bitsafe
• Tradeweb executed a groundbreaking transaction on Canton Network, using a repo application that leveraged the CIP-56 token standard. This milestone marked the first real-time, fully on-chain financing of U.S. Treasuries (UST) against USDC, and demonstrates how CIP-56 enables atomic, on-chain workflows that power 24/7 financing use cases.

Ready to start building on Canton?

Take advantage of the latest features in Canton today and start creating highly composable applications for 24/7 on-chain capital markets and payments with institutional-grade privacy:

• Learn how to easily integrate with the token standard using our Wallet SDK here
• Explore the updated Quickstart example application which features the token standard
• See different ways to participate and get started here