Visa Joins the Canton Network as a Super Validator, Signaling Institutional Blockchain Maturity

Author | jk

On March 20, 2026, Visa, a globally recognized payment service provider and the company represented by the logo found on most debit and credit cards, submitted a governance proposal to Canton Network. According to The Block, just three days later, the proposal was approved, and Visa officially became a Super Validator on Canton with the highest weight level of 10 (Super Validator Weight 10). This marks Visa’s first-ever submission of a blockchain governance proposal.

In the crypto space, this might appear as yet another incursion by traditional finance. But if you understand the legal and compliance processes within traditional institutions like Visa, you’ll realize that approval in just three days is highly unusual. The fact that Visa’s compliance team submitted this document implies the utmost caution and seriousness characteristic of the traditional financial world—and the fact that it received the highest level of approval indicates that all negotiations and due diligence were already fully completed beforehand. The proposal seen by the public is likely the result of months of close collaboration between traditional finance and the crypto industry.

Rubail Birwadker, Head of Global Growth Products and Strategic Partnerships at Visa, said in a statement: "Many banks view the lack of privacy as the biggest barrier to moving meaningful business onto the chain. By serving as a super validator for the Canton Network, we are bringing Visa-level trust, governance, and operational standards into this privacy-preserving blockchain infrastructure, enabling regulated financial institutions to move payment operations on-chain without disrupting their existing workflows."

It is clear that Visa’s entry represents an acknowledgment of an already well-established institutional network, rather than a starting point.

Since 2017, each market cycle has seen a number of traditional financial institutions loudly announce their “exploration of blockchain,” yet very few have successfully turned these initiatives into real business operations. This time, Visa has chosen to enter the governance layer of blockchain, holding voting rights and participating in infrastructure decisions. Eric Saraniecki, Head of Network Strategy at Digital Asset, a co-founder of the Canton Network, stated in a press release: “Visa’s participation confirms that this technology has moved from the experimental phase into a production-ready stage.”

Curious about this partnership, Odaily Planet Daily interviewed the Canton Network team. What prompted this collaboration? And what led to Canton—this long-under-the-radar project—being chosen?

To understand why Canton attracts Visa, we first need to examine the core differences between Canton and other blockchains.

Ethereum and Solana address the question of how to get more people involved and how to bring more assets on-chain. Canton addresses the question of how financial institutions can conduct business on-chain normally. While the focus may seem different, their specific designs end up making nearly opposite trade-offs.

Ethereum’s global transparency is an advantage for retail investors but a barrier for institutions. For example, if a bank’s foreign exchange trading desk had every dollar or euro trade visible in real time, counterparties could immediately adjust their quotes based on that information, significantly increasing the bank’s trading costs. If market makers’ positions and hedging activities were fully public, competitors could directly mirror opposite trades, eliminating profit margins. Repurchase agreements between institutions involve sensitive data on both parties’ cash positions and collateral sizes; any leakage of this information could jeopardize the institution’s overall liquidity management. These constraints are not directly tied to regulation—they are dictated by fundamental business logic.

Even if there is no link between an address and a real-name entity, the transparency of on-chain transactions alters the entire secondary market dynamic. Traditional financial institutions do not want their trades to be targeted, so designs like Ethereum and Hyperliquid are not optimal for large institutions.

Canton's approach incorporates data visibility controls into its design.

This approach embeds selective disclosure of data directly into the protocol layer as a native feature of L1, rather than relying on patchwork solutions at the application layer. Specifically, only the direct participants of a transaction can view its details, while the network verifies it without exposing any sensitive information. Two banks can conduct cross-border settlements on the same shared infrastructure, with the transaction completely invisible to all unrelated parties. Competitors can interact on the same network without revealing their positions or strategies.

We also asked about the technical details; Canton’s exact words were: “Canton separates the coordination layer (shared across the network) from data visibility (limited to participants) by isolating execution environments and enabling selective synchronization. This allows institutions to transact securely and interact with competitors without exposing their positions or strategies. It is the mechanism that enables true markets—not just assets—to operate natively on-chain.”

Canton Network tells us that the summary of this design logic is: data visibility control is foundational, not an add-on.

So why does Canton’s list of validators look like a gathering of old money: Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, BNP Paribas, Citibank, Bank of America, DTCC, Nasdaq, Broadridge, Tradeweb...? These institutions are joining because this infrastructure allows them to replicate the success of traditional finance—and that’s why liquidity is gradually flowing in.

Canton's Super Validator List

Canton was created by Digital Asset Holdings, founded in 2014 by Blythe Masters. Blythe Masters is a former star executive at JPMorgan Chase and one of the key pioneers in the CDS space, with deep connections and strong industry credibility on Wall Street. From day one, this company has not targeted retail users with blockchain products; its target clients are financial institutions with real balance sheets, subject to strict regulation, and requiring operation within a legal framework.

Regarding its origins, we asked a pointed question: We saw Canton emerge in 2023—why wasn’t it officially launched in full until this year?

Canton's response was that slow work yields fine results.

Wall Street’s origins have defined the entire project’s pace. Canton admitted in the interview that this chain took longer to reach today’s stage than other L1s because it has been addressing regulated financial systems, building institutional trust, and figuring out how to truly connect with markets that have real business operations from the very beginning.

This pace is completely opposite to the mainstream Web3 narrative. Most public blockchains aim for rapid launch, quick ecosystem expansion, and immediate hype—rolling out the TGE and then admitting, “The team isn’t even sure.” Canton, by contrast, takes a step-by-step approach: first securing DTCC, then Goldman Sachs, then JPMorgan Chase, then Visa—using their endorsements to bring in real business.

2026 is a turning point—not because of project marketing or because this crypto bear market is reshaping the industry, but because, above the narratives, infrastructure has for the first time truly met institutional requirements: real balance sheet activity is now running on it. This is why now is the best time to pay attention to Canton Network.

So how much business did it bring in? We continued asking.

Canton’s current data is atypical within the broader blockchain industry, and the nature behind these figures differs significantly from that of most public blockchains. Currently, Canton Network processes over $9 trillion in monthly volume, with hundreds of thousands of daily transactions, and the number of ecosystem participants has grown by orders of magnitude over the past three years. These numbers reflect traditional financial activities: tokenized repurchase agreements, government bond settlement, and cross-institutional collateral movement. These are not fabricated volumes—they are real transactions occurring on institutional balance sheets.

We also asked which products are currently mainstream on-chain. Currently, the following flagship products stand out:

JPM Coin by J.P. Morgan: In January 2026, J.P. Morgan’s Kinexys division announced the native deployment of JPM Coin on the Canton Network. Unlike USDT or USDC, JPM Coin is a deposit token representing direct claims on J.P. Morgan deposits, operating within existing banking regulatory frameworks. For example, when two institutions settle a cross-border transaction on Canton using JPM Coin, the underlying process is no different from traditional systems—except that settlement is significantly faster and no longer restricted to business days. Kinexys currently processes daily transaction volumes between $20 billion and $30 billion, with a cumulative total exceeding $1.5 trillion since 2019; this flow of funds is now set to operate on Canton.

DTCC’s Tokenization of U.S. Treasuries: In December 2025, the U.S. securities depository DTCC announced a partnership with Digital Asset to tokenize a portion of its custodied U.S. Treasuries on the Canton network, aiming to launch the first version in a controlled production environment in the first half of 2026, with future expansion based on market demand. DTCC is also co-chairing the Canton Foundation alongside Euroclear, directly participating in network governance.

DTCC processes over $20 quadrillion in securities transactions annually and serves as the core of the U.S. capital market’s clearing and settlement infrastructure. To draw a simple analogy, DTCC’s role in traditional finance is somewhat like that of the People’s Bank of China—no one can deposit money directly into it, but all stock and bond trades must pass through its back-end systems. In traditional repurchase markets, transactions can only occur on business days, with operations halted after Friday afternoon until Monday. On Canton, however, repurchase transactions run 24/7, using on-chain U.S. Treasuries as collateral to enable real-time, cross-institutional, cross-time-zone funding that spans weekends.

So what will Visa do on Canton?

A core goal described by Canton in the interview is atomic settlement: the buyer’s payment and the seller’s asset delivery occur simultaneously within a single transaction, eliminating the need for two separate steps or reliance on intermediaries to bridge the process. For example, currently, when an institution purchases a batch of bonds, the transfer of assets and the settlement of cash often occur as two distinct processes with a time lag, counterparty risk, and manual reconciliation costs. Canton aims to make both actions happen at once—locked in instantly, with no delay. To achieve this goal, both capital markets infrastructure and payment infrastructure must exist on-chain. Canton has already established a strong presence in the capital markets; Visa’s participation provides a genuine institutional anchor on the payment side.

In addition, this includes real-time cross-border capital flows and embedding programmable logic into financial transactions—areas where blockchain excels.

Canton believes that 2026 is the first cycle in which infrastructure will truly meet institutional requirements, which is why institutions like Visa are choosing to enter blockchain infrastructure now.

Other use cases already running

Tokenized repurchase agreements are currently the most mature use case. Repurchase agreements (repos) are the most common short-term financing tool among financial institutions: essentially, Institution A sells bonds to Institution B in exchange for cash, with an agreement to repurchase the bonds a few days later. Traditionally, this process could only be executed during business hours, and funds settlement was delayed. On Canton, tokenized repos have achieved 24/7 availability and instant settlement, with several leading institutions already executing real, cross-institutional repo transactions that span weekends.

Collateral mobilization is also a scenario with real-world demand. Large financial institutions frequently need to move collateral from one account or institution to another—for example, transferring bonds held at location A to location B to meet margin requirements for a derivatives trade. Traditionally, this process takes several days, during which the assets are locked and unavailable for other uses. Canton’s settlement model enables this process to be completed nearly in real time.

Digital bond issuance is another area where Canton holds a competitive advantage. Canton noted in the interview that it currently holds more than half of the global digital bond issuance market share. This is because Canton provides end-to-end delivery versus payment (DvP), comprehensive bond lifecycle management, and multi-party coordination—enabling a fully on-chain闭环 from issuance to settlement, rather than merely tokenizing assets and relying on off-chain processes to complete the transaction.

Stablecoin settlement is a direction accelerating since Visa’s involvement, aiming to enable stablecoin payments between institutions to be completed on a single compliant infrastructure with data visibility controls, rather than routing through public blockchains.

In short, RWA wasn't mentioned explicitly, but every sentence speaks to the demand for RWA.

In the interview, Canton also provided a general outlook on the upcoming roadmap: in the medium term, corporate bonds, private credit, and trade finance will follow; in the longer term, equities will also be on this path. The logic from existing use cases to this roadmap is consistent—the asset classes with greater liquidity and more mature regulatory frameworks move first.

For broader market participants, the question of what exactly this CC token is remains unavoidable.

Canton's qualitative comparison in the interview was straightforward: CC is a "network utility asset," whose value is anchored to the volume of real financial activity occurring on the network.

This means demand stems from actual usage: the greater the trading volume by institutions on Canton, the more CC the network consumes. Long-term token drivers include institutional trading volume, stablecoin settlement size, total on-chain assets, and the depth of interoperability between Canton and other networks.

CC has a setup in token distribution that is quite rare in the Web3 space: no pre-mine, no team allocation, and no VC share—所有代币通过公平方式进入市场. For institutional participants, this setup eliminates concerns about "someone holding ultra-low-cost tokens who could exit at any time on the secondary market," ensuring transparent and equitable rules for all participants.

For ordinary market participants, Canton exists primarily as backend infrastructure; most people interact with it indirectly through exchanges, wallets, or financial platforms, rather than directly with the protocol. Improvements it enables—such as faster settlement, tighter bid-ask spreads, and better financial product terms due to lower operational costs—are gradually transmitted to end users through the product layer, rather than being directly perceptible.

Canton’s three- to five-year goals, as outlined in the interview, are not measured by on-chain TVL or token price. From several specific targets Canton listed: stablecoins become the standard method for institutional settlements, just as SWIFT wire transfers are today; major financial institutions—such as banks—can directly operate loans, deposits, bond issuances, and product packaging on-chain; cross-border capital no longer undergoes traditional settlement cycles lasting days but flows at near-real-time speeds; multiple asset classes are natively issued and settled on Canton, rather than being issued off-chain and manually synchronized to the chain.

Canton describes this state as "invisible": at that point, Canton will be one of the underlying protocols quietly powering global finance—much like TCP/IP is to the internet, or SWIFT is to cross-border payments—so users don’t perceive its presence, yet nothing could function without it.

Of course, this path is still very long. Regulation is highly fragmented across jurisdictions—the approach to compliance in Europe is entirely different from that in Asia; integrating with existing legacy systems is extremely challenging, as banks’ core systems have been in use for decades and cannot be migrated overnight; interoperability between different blockchain networks remains an unresolved technical issue; and coordinating institutions on the same infrastructure involves highly complex利益博弈. The Canton team did not shy away from these challenges in their interview, telling us: Technical bottlenecks are no longer the biggest issue—it’s how to truly scale globally.

It’s clear that changes in financial infrastructure never happen suddenly on a single day. SWIFT, established in 1973, took nearly two decades to become the true standard for cross-border settlements. Today, people use it without thinking about how it came to be. Canton is now at a stage similar to that—when no one yet realizes what it could become. But for something truly meant to be infrastructure, being forgotten may be the very sign of its success.