Cardano Foundation and Fireblocks will bring Cardano Native Tokens, or CNTs, onto the institutional custody platform, the Swiss nonprofit announced on September 24. Tokens issued directly on the Cardano blockchain will become standard assets on Fireblocks, letting the thousands of banks, exchanges, payment firms and fintechs that use the platform custody, send and receive them with the same security and policy controls they apply to every other digital asset. Fireblocks, which says it secures more than $16 trillion in digital asset transactions, has supported Cardano’s native currency ADA since 2021, but CNTs have until now required extra manual steps.
Native tokens, standard treatment
CNTs are minted directly on Cardano alongside ADA rather than through a separate contract, and the integration covers two standards: CIP-26, the Cardano Token Registry, and CIP-68, the onchain metadata framework. Once support lands, tokens built to either standard become standard assets instead of bespoke additions. Cardano Foundation chief executive Frederik Gregaard framed the move as an infrastructure play. “Institutions rarely adopt a new asset on its own. Adoption happens through trusted infrastructure,” he said. “Bringing Cardano Native Tokens onto Fireblocks puts the assets issued on Cardano in front of the exchanges, payment firms and fintechs that build on that infrastructure every day.”
A 2027 rollout, not an immediate launch
The announcement is a technical roadmap, not a finished deployment. Cardano Foundation said support is expected by March 2027, and the two organizations plan to scope further DeFi and ecosystem integrations over the same year. The notice does not report new token issuance or institutional purchases of ADA. Stephen Richardson, Fireblocks’ chief strategy officer and head of banking, said banks weigh two things before issuing new assets: “the network the asset lives on and the infrastructure they’ll engage with managing that asset.” Cardano, he said, has spent a decade building credibility through peer-reviewed research, formal verification and a governance model institutions can scrutinize, while Fireblocks supplies “the security and policy controls that more than 100 banks rely on.”
Cardano’s institutional push
The Fireblocks integration extends a run of institutional moves by the Cardano Foundation. The nonprofit opened a blockchain lab at the University of Brasília earlier this year to expand its Latin American footprint, and it has backed a capital-markets blockchain risk framework aimed at traditional finance. For issuers of stablecoins and tokenized real-world assets on Cardano, standard Fireblocks support removes a practical barrier: those assets reach the same rails as ADA instead of waiting for a custodian to add each token by hand.