Three of Japan's most prominent financial institutions — Mizuho Financial Group, Nomura Holdings, and Japan Securities Clearing Corporation (JSCC) — have announced a joint proof-of-concept with Canton's parent company, Digital Asset, to test digital collateral management for Japanese Government Bonds (JGBs) on the Canton Network.
According to a press release shared with The Defiant, the proof-of-concept is part of a broader initiative supported by the Financial Services Agency’s (FSA) Payment Innovation Project. The move aims to verify the efficacy of blockchain for transferring JGB rights within the country's existing legal framework, specifically the Act on Book-Entry Transfer of Corporate Bonds and Shares.
The project’s main goal is to enable 24/7 real-time collateral transactions, a meaningful upgrade from current infrastructure constrained by business hours and manual reconciliation. By integrating legacy systems with Canton's blockchain rails, the consortium hopes to dramatically cut the administrative overhead associated with posting and substituting collateral.
The project will also test cross-border scenarios, examining how JGBs can move between clearing houses, institutional investors, clients, and agents across both domestic and international markets, per the release.
JGBs are among the widely accepted forms of eligible collateral globally, according to the release, making their on-chain availability strategically significant.
Canton Network positions itself as a public Layer 1 blockchain with customizable privacy features designed for TradFi institutions. The “public” claim has drawn heat from prominent voices across the crypto industry.
Canton’s TradFi Moves
Canton has been on an institutional partnership tear heading into 2026. Fintech Transcend recently connected to the network, enabling clients to move collateral and cash in real time across counterparties using a mix of traditional and tokenized assets.
Before that, JPMorgan announced it would issue its deposit token natively on Canton, with rollout planned in phases throughout 2026, following DTCC's selection of Canton to tokenize a subset of the U.S. Treasury securities it holds, citing the platform's privacy features.
Meanwhile, fellow Japanese TradFi giant Mitsui & Co. has also been expanding its on-chain footprint, with its crypto arm announced last week that it would bring its tokenized metals asset ZipangCoin to Optimism’s L2 OP Mainnet — the first deployment of the token on a public blockchain.
U.S. Treasury debt currently makes up the largest portion of distributed tokenized real-world assets (RWAs) — assets that are transferable on-chain — with over $13.7 billion, over half of which is on Ethereum, per data from RWAxyz.
In contrast, all of the $334.35 billion in tokenized repurchase agreements (repos) on Canton is considered represented value, as it only uses blockchain, in this case Canton, for record keeping.
This article was written with the assistance of AI workflows. All our stories are curated, edited and fact-checked by a human.