Crypto Protocol Canton Is Betting It Can Win Over Wall Street

First, there were NFTs. Then, there were memecoins. Then, there were creator coins. Each shiny new crypto trend died nearly as fast as the last.

Considering that, maybe it's not surprising to see the latest hot blockchain challenger, Canton, taking up an entirely different approach.

Canton co-founder Yuval Rooz joined Coinage in the latest round of our community-nominated Crypto Project of the Year series to explain why it's not just part of the initial launch strategy — but also a bet on what will last years down the road in crypto's institutional-era.

"The problem with retail applications is that they are very cyclical in nature. They can come very fast, they can become very big, but they can also just as easily go and disappear very fast," Rooz explained, noting Canton has instead first focused on bringing billions of dollars in repo markets onchain. "I can tell you, if the [repo] market were to be up 10% or down 10%, or move sideways, that market would still print $10 to $10.5 trillion every day and we think that if you can bring those things on chain, you have almost a much more stable kind of revenue generating mechanism."

Rooz, who is also CEO of Digital Asset, has a very different view than most crypto founders on what the industry can become. In his telling, crypto is finally approaching the moment where the question is no longer how loud a community is, or how strong the narrative feels on social media. The question is whether the network generates real economic value, and whether that value actually flows back to token holders.

“There’s one Bitcoin and that’s it,” Rooz said. But once you move beyond Bitcoin’s store-of-value lane and into smart contract chains, he argued, the standard should get tougher fast. “The actual financial value that you generate on those networks [should] translate somehow into … the value of the token.” And in his view, most of crypto still fails that test.

To prove his point, he took a direct shot at Cardano, saying “there’s really nothing happening on the chain, yet the chain is worth $10 billion and I just don't understand how you can justify that.”

On the other side of things, Rooz was equally quick to compliment Hyperliquid (also a finalist in our Crypto Project of the Year series in finalist voting against Canton.) While most of crypto has started 2026 in the red, HYPE is up by about 20% on the year.

“Hype and Canton are really the only Layer-1s that are actually doing that at the moment,” he said, arguing that both projects at least attempt to connect activity coming onto infrastructure-level financial rails with token-holder value.

"If [Hyperliquid] does more revenue, then [Hyperliquid's foundation] will buy more tokens back and therefore the value of the token should increase," he said. "That, to me, is logical, right? And if you then take that by extension, that's how Canton works but it's not at a discretion of the foundation. It's built into the tokenomics itself."

That may be the real thesis hiding underneath the Canton story: That its next leg up may come from onboarding larger and larger institutions. Canton has already signed a deal with DTCC to bring U.S. treasuries onchain and was tapped to launch JPMorgan's JPM coin. Notably, a number of financial giants, including Goldman Sachs, Citadel, and Tradeweb are backers of Digital Asset, which raised $135 million last year to accelerate Canton's adoption.

Years ago, those names might not have been at the top of the list of entities that were excited to build onchain. But now, Rooz claims that enough of the hard questions have been solved to make institutions comfortable. Regulations continue to shift pro-crypto as well.

If Rooz is right, and retail isn't as large of a focus anymore, the next great crypto winner may not look like a casino at all. It may look like the back office.

I want to see a company that does nothing related to crypto use this infrastructure to make their treasury management more efficient," Rooz said. "To me, those are the positive signs for the industry.