The founding team behind Canton Network includes early Bitcoin/Zcash contributor and SNARK developer, Shaul Kfir. In his recent posts he highlights that while a ‘broadcast everything’ approach in public blockchains supported censorship-resistant money, it breaks down in global finance.
That’s why Canton’s design started by defining what finance onchain really needed to scale for global markets - not which blockchain category to fit into.
Canton Network wasn’t designed to recreate legacy banking systems onchain. It was built to upgrade the entire financial stack.
That meant taking the most promising primitives from open networks (composability, connectivity, decentralization, open innovation), and combining them with the control, choice, and well-aligned incentives required to bring real-world finance, capital markets, and global payments onchain at scale.
Monolithic chains ultimately force every transaction into the same global compute environment, where activity must be broadcast across the network to be ordered and processed.
Canton is designed as a network of networks instead: where permissioned institutional infrastructure, permissionless apps, and open DeFi protocols can coexist and compose, while application owners retain control over access, data visibility, and scaling.
Anyone can join the Canton Network, while application owners define the model that fits their business - from open access to KYC-gated participation.
Open at the network layer. With sovereign control at the application layer.
Legacy public blockchains operate like broadcast radio. Everyone can hear everything, and anyone can transmit. Transparency is how these networks establish trust and enable composability; transactions are broadcast across the network and visible to everyone. Attempts at privacy need to be layered on afterwards to obscure sensitive data. It’s not a native capability to prevent data being shared in the first place.
Figure 1: Canton and the Internet: open networks, with permissioning at the app level
Real markets rely on a delicate balance of trust and selective information sharing. Participants need to know a counterparty can fulfil their obligations, but they don’t need to see that counterparty’s entire balance sheet.
Like the internet, Canton is an open public network where anyone can connect and build. But applications define their own access rules and data visibility. Transactions are not broadcast across the entire network. And apps always have the assurance they can transact directly with other applications, with blockchain composability and speed.
Think of your banking app and an online store. Your bank sets its own identity rules to access its app, but anyone can browse and shop at the online store. They have different levels of permissioning, yet these apps interact seamlessly when you make a payment - and transactions remain private to those involved.
Canton securely upgrades this model onchain, eliminating the delays, costs and risks embedded in today’s financial infrastructure.
Configurable disclosure, combined with the composability of Canton applications, unlocks use cases that remain unworkable on other chains at scale today, from using stablecoins with baked-in privacy for financing, to running global payroll without exposing everyone’s salary.
For years, the industry was in a deadlock.
Choose a public chain for composability and network effects but sacrifice privacy and control. Or choose a private chain for control but get stuck in a silo without composability, atomicity or shared liquidity.
Institutions and applications of all kinds were forced into unscalable POCs or privacy trade-offs that have been an ongoing concern in public blockchains since day 1.
Canton breaks this cycle by resolving the privacy-composability deadlock. This is how we get to $100 trillion and beyond onchain.
“Public chains force you to publish everything to get composability. Canton enables Cross-Synchronizer Atomicity. You keep data private; the network proves validity. This is how we get the next $100T onchain.”
https://x.com/shaulkfir/status/2003793334079562027Canton doesn’t force the ecosystem into a single monolithic infrastructure. Network access is increasingly open to all, and the infrastructure itself is open source. At the same time, applications maintain control over access, privacy, governance, and compliance, without sacrificing connectivity.
“Because of the "Network of Networks" architecture, you can bypass the Global Synchronizer entirely. Spin up a Synchronizer. Build your own "Degen" or "Bored Ape" subnet. On Ethereum, if you don't like the validator’s rules, you fork. On Canton, you just add a new route. If you transact with a bank later, the protocol allows atomic swaps across private/public synchronizers.”
https://x.com/shaulkfir/status/2003793334079562027
Figure 2: Canton Network’s architecture creates a network of composable networks
Unlike other public chains, transactions on Canton are not submitted to a global mempool to be ordered by unrelated validators. Validation only occurs between a transaction's stakeholders.
If Bank A and Bank B exchange an asset for a stablecoin, only the relevant counterparties and required validators participate in confirming the transaction - not the entire network. This ‘proof of stakeholder’ approach is also the key to Canton’s need-to-know privacy model.
Apps and assets remain atomically composable (that means assets can be swapped ‘risk-free’, with both sides of a transaction settling together, or not at all) because of the Global Synchronizer, eliminating today’s clunky daisy chain of separate steps across different systems.
The crypto cycle is moving from its Speculation Phase, to the Utility Phase.
Real utility means real money, assets, infrastructure and institutions moving onchain with confidence. It means answering the critical question: Tokenization to what end? The answer is to transform assets into liquid, capital-efficient instruments; instruments that can finally function as highly mobile, low-risk settlement and collateral assets across markets.
It means onchain treasuries, commercial deposits, stablecoins, and privacy-enabled crypto-assets that all work together. It means an environment that protects participants while allowing them to innovate.
When major asset managers started to tokenize funds, they didn’t want "walled gardens." They wanted the distribution and connectivity of a public network. But they also want the market-level optimization and balance sheet efficiencies that bringing these assets onchain should deliver.
For this to happen they need the confidence that when assets move, clients know transaction details are confidential. They need to know these assets can find real liquidity and distribution across financial markets. And they need certainty there won’t be operational delays because of the latest airdrop or memecoin frenzy.
This is why Franklin Templeton chose Canton to expand the use of iBenji - seeking interoperability and real utility for such assets, without compromising on privacy.
Canton proves that openness and institutional-grade control are not diametric opposites but the twin pillars of a mature onchain economy.
The Canton ecosystem is driven by one goal: upgrading global markets to make finance flow.
Achieving this meant pragmatic architectural choices made over a decade ago - building the primitives that institutions require to participate, and the new rails of connectivity they crave.
That infrastructure now exists. And it’s bringing global finance onchain.