How Canton Emerged as the Biggest Challenger to Ethereum and Solana
Some of Wall Street's biggest players are backing a challenger few in crypto saw coming
By Zack Guzman
January 20, 2026
For much of crypto’s recent history, the debate has been framed as a duel: Ethereum versus Solana. Decentralization versus speed. Permissionless ideals versus institutional adoption.
But as 2026 begins, a third name is forcing its way into that binary — and it didn’t arrive through hype cycles, retail speculation, or meme-driven momentum.
It arrived through Wall Street.
“Canton came up out of nowhere for a few people,” Canton Foundation General Director Joris Delanoue tells Coinage, “but I think it has been grounded into Wall Street for the last 10 years.”
That single line captures why Canton has become one of the most quietly disruptive networks in crypto. While Ethereum and Solana spent the last decade optimizing for public markets and developer mindshare, Canton was being built for a different audience entirely — institutions that wanted blockchain functionality without abandoning the requirements that govern trillions of dollars in real-world finance.
The result is an ecosystem that looks full of financial incumbents that crypto was once openly trying to unseat: Goldman Sachs, BNP Paribas, Tradeweb, Nasdaq, BNY Mellon, even Citadel. But as Delanoue explains, those names aren’t just backers — they’re the network’s defining advantage.
“The list of names that you just dropped is what I would call the moat,” he said. “A lot of other ecosystems would have loved to convince these type of companies, projects, teams, or big names to participate in their ecosystem.”
Indeed, since President Trump took office even the biggest crypto holdouts in finance have been rushing to accelerate tokenization plans. JPMorgan, for example, recently announced a big push with their JPM Deposit Coin for institutional clients. First, the token made its debut on Base, the Coinbase Ethereum Layer-2 network. This month, JPMorgan announced it was also launching on Canton.
As the momentum builds among institutional clients, Delanoue tells Coinage the Canton foundation and its group of builders are still fielding ideas on how to best tweak and improve pieces of the network.
“Building this is already pretty big and significant,” he said, adding that what often goes unnoticed is the work happening beneath the surface. “Every week we have like 80, 90 people of the community on the same call trying to work on what are the tokenomics, on the accountability as well, checking milestones.”
That emphasis on accountability — not just decentralization as a slogan — is central to Canton’s positioning. Delanoue described it as decentralization in practice rather than ideology and explained how that eventually shifted his attention away from Ethereum to focus more on what Canton was building.
“I like the fact that decentralization is not just said, but it’s experimenting,” he said. “The simple fact that I can come and be this voice for many other players and say things out loud is already what I consider as the best proof of decentralization.”
Delanoue is also the co-founder of tokenized equity platform Fairmint, and credits built-in privacy features as one of the main reasons why Canton may continue to outpace other chains in onboarding institutions.
“Privacy is one of the most important parts of TradFi,” Delanoue said. “If we want to bring use cases from TradFi on chain, we need to match their expectations in terms of privacy.”
He compared Canton’s trajectory to the early days of cloud computing, when public infrastructure alone wasn’t enough to win over governments and banks.
“Cloud by default was public, and that was unacceptable,” he said. “A few years after, we started to have security layers, privacy layers. And today everyone is on the cloud.”
Canton, in his view, represents that same evolution for blockchains — not replacing public chains like Ethereum or Solana, but complementing them.
“I think they are complementary,” Delanoue said when asked to compare Canton to Ethereum’s emphasis on privacy in 2026 and its ZK-driven roadmap. “Both will be big. But both serve different type of use cases and customer expectations.”
Certainly, both of those strategies can eventually find success, but if most of the attention continues to revolve around the sheer value of assets moving onchain, it's hard to see how Canton can't continue to be a leader. But does that necessarily mean the Canton token stands to benefit? It may be too early to tell. The token is one of the freshest to be featured in Coinage's Crypto Project of the Year series, having only launched last November.
Over the last month, Canton has risen 20%, while Ethereum has traded flat.
“The Canton coin has intrinsic value in the sense that whatever activity that comes on chain means that there is a lot of burn,” Delanoue said. “These burns mean that you accrue value to the token.”
Coinage Caucus and Network NFT holders, along with $COINAGE holders on Base and BAT holders on Ethereum can vote to advance Canton in our Crypto Project of the Year series when voting opens (must be holders by the time the snapshot is taken.)
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