Ethereum

This is the second post in our network series. In the first, we covered Bitcoin, the origin chain. This time we turn to Ethereum, the chain on which most of the onchain financial activity our customers run actually lives: stablecoins, tokenized assets, and the next generation of programmable finance.

If Bitcoin proved that value could move without a trusted intermediary, Ethereum proved that the rules around value could be written in software. It is the second foundational chain, and for most institutions building onchain today, it is the one their products actually run on. Stablecoin settlement, tokenized funds and treasuries, onchain credit, exchange operations, and the long tail of decentralized finance overwhelmingly originate on Ethereum and the networks that share its execution model.

Over the past two years, Ethereum has crossed the same institutional threshold Bitcoin did, and in some dimensions a deeper one. Spot Ether ETFs have traded in the United States since July 2024, when the SEC approved eight of them, led by BlackRock’s iShares Ethereum Trust. They drew roughly $9.6 billion in net inflows in 2025, their first full year of trading. The category then took a step Bitcoin structurally cannot: staking. The first US Ether staking ETFs reached the market in late 2025, and in March 2026 BlackRock launched its iShares Staked Ethereum Trust (ETHB) on Nasdaq, distributing staking rewards on top of spot exposure. The legal path opened on March 17, 2026, when the SEC, joined by the CFTC, issued an interpretive release (Nos. 33-11412; 34-105020) concluding that staking activities on proof-of-stake networks are not securities transactions, covering solo, custodial, and liquid staking. An Ether ETF can now pay a yield a Bitcoin ETF cannot, because the underlying asset is productive.

This post walks through what Ethereum is and how it works, the institutional use cases it powers, every Ethereum and EVM capability DFNS supports today, the cryptography and security architecture underneath, and where we are taking the platform next.

Why Ethereum, and why now

We started this series with Bitcoin because it is the origin chain and the asset most institutions hold first. Ethereum is the natural second, because it is where the actual work of onchain finance happens. Holding Bitcoin is custody of an asset. Operating on Ethereum is running products: issuing stablecoins, servicing tokenized funds, settling payments, managing collateral. The requirements are higher, and so is the opportunity. It helps to be clear about what Ethereum is, in plain terms.

If Bitcoin is a ledger that records who owns what, Ethereum is a ledger that can also run the rules. It launched in 2015 as the first blockchain able to execute programs, not just track balances. Those programs, usually called smart contracts, are agreements that enforce themselves: a bond that pays its own coupon, a fund that processes its own subscriptions and redemptions, an escrow that releases only when its conditions are met. No intermediary has to be trusted to follow the terms, because the terms are the code.

A few properties matter for a financial institution:

• It works like a ledger of accounts. Ethereum tracks accounts and balances, much as a core banking system does, rather than the coin-by-coin model Bitcoin uses. That structure is what makes genuine financial logic, lending, tokenized funds, structured settlement, expressible directly on the network.
• It is a productive asset. In 2022, Ethereum moved to a model where the network is secured by participants who commit ETH rather than by mining. Those participants earn a yield, currently running at around 3.1% annually, and roughly 30% of all ETH is committed this way today. This is what lets an Ether ETF pay a return a Bitcoin ETF cannot, and it makes ETH itself a yield-bearing treasury asset.
• Costs and capacity have improved sharply. Most institutional activity now settles on faster, lower-cost networks built on top of Ethereum, such as Arbitrum, Base, Optimism, and Polygon, which inherit Ethereum’s security while cutting transaction costs dramatically. A payment or a tokenized asset can run on one of these and still settle back to Ethereum itself.
• It is actively maintained. Unlike Bitcoin, Ethereum evolves on a regular schedule. Its May 2025 upgrade let ordinary accounts take on programmable behavior, enabling features such as sponsored fees, where an institution covers transaction costs so its customers never need to hold a crypto asset to transact. A December 2025 upgrade lowered settlement costs further, and the next is due in the second half of 2026. The direction is consistent: toward accounts that behave like software and settlement cheap enough for everyday financial use.

The conclusion for an institution is straightforward. Ethereum is already where stablecoins, tokenized assets, and onchain markets operate at scale, it is now investable through regulated vehicles, and it pays a yield. The question is no longer whether to engage with it, but how to operate on it with the control the business requires.

What a core banking platform brings to Ethereum

For most of Ethereum’s history, an institution that wanted to use it faced a stitching problem. Custody came from one vendor, transaction handling from another, compliance screening from a third, and the connective tissue, policies, approvals, audit, treasury logic, was built and maintained in house. That is how you connect to a network. It is not how you run a business on one.

DFNS closes that gap. We are a core banking platform for digital assets: the full operational layer an institution needs to run financial products on Ethereum the way it runs the rest of its business. Accounts, transaction management, policy and approvals, compliance and audit, treasury, tokenization, and key security are one system, reached through one API, governed by one set of controls.

That distinction is what changes the picture for Ethereum. A wallet lets you hold an asset. A core banking platform lets you operate: issue a stablecoin and manage its reserves, service a tokenized fund across its full lifecycle, run an exchange’s deposit and withdrawal flows, move treasury across networks, each under the approval quorums, limits, screening, and auditability a regulated institution has to demonstrate. The same platform that holds the keys also enforces who may do what, screens every transaction before it signs, and produces evidence a regulator will accept. Ethereum stops being a network an institution connects to and becomes infrastructure an institution can build a regulated business on.

The institutions already doing this are not running experiments. Founded in 2020, DFNS is trusted by over 400 financial institutions and fintechs, including Standard Chartered Bank, First Abu Dhabi Bank, IBM, Broadridge, Apex Group, Stripe, Kraken, Circle, and Susquehanna. We secure over 100B EUR across 20M wallets, with zero security breaches since inception, and process over $10 billion in transactions a month under SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, ISO 27017, and ISO 27018 certifications (KPMG), continuous third-party penetration testing, and an in-house cryptography research team that contributes original protocols to the industry. The majority of that activity runs on Ethereum and EVM networks. Every one of those flows has to work, every time, for institutions to put real volume on the rails.

How DFNS unlocked Ethereum for traditional finance

In October 2025, IBM announced its global digital assets platform, IBM Digital Asset Haven, built on DFNS’ wallet infrastructure. It is one of the most significant milestones in institutional digital asset adoption to date. Through this partnership, DFNS’ technology is embedded inside IBM’s network of financial institutions, brokerages, payment providers, governments, and corporates, enabling them to securely build and scale blockchain-based services, from custody and treasury to payments, tokenization, and settlement.

For Ethereum specifically, this matters because Ethereum is where most institutional tokenization and stablecoin activity is heading. Ethereum is the dominant settlement layer for tokenized real-world assets, the home of the largest tokenized money market funds, and the chain on which the majority of regulated stablecoin supply is issued. A Tier-1 bank evaluating how to issue a stablecoin, service a tokenized fund, or settle onchain now has a path that runs through infrastructure already vetted by one of the most conservative technology partners in financial services.

Why institutions choose DFNS for Ethereum

DFNS is a core banking platform for digital assets: the sovereign infrastructure layer that sits between a regulated institution’s business logic and the underlying blockchain networks. Just as a core banking system powers the operational backbone of a traditional bank, DFNS provides the equivalent for digital assets, a bank-grade platform for wallet management, key orchestration, transaction processing, governance, and compliance enforcement, through one unified experience. On Ethereum, where a single signature can move an entire token balance or hand a contract standing authority over your assets, that operational backbone is what separates connecting to the network from running a business on it.

Six things make the difference:

1. One operating system across Ethereum, its Layer 2s, and beyond. DFNS unifies wallets, assets, users, organizations, policies, and business logic under a single system. The same platform that runs Ethereum mainnet runs Arbitrum, Base, Optimism, Polygon, and the other EVM networks, and extends to 100+ chains beyond them. Transactions, rules, metrics, and audit logs live in one place, so an institution scales across networks and products without fragmenting its infrastructure or rebuilding for each chain.
2. API-first and programmable by design. Every capability, wallet creation, key management, policy enforcement, transaction signing, automation, and recovery, is available programmatically through a clean REST API and first-class SDKs, with native support for the Ethereum developer stack including viem, ethers.js, and WalletConnect. The dashboard is a thin client over the same API, so anything a person can do, a system can do: embed wallets directly into a product, automate treasury and settlement, and build financial applications without depending on manual, UI-driven steps.
3. Governance and compliance enforced at the infrastructure layer. Approval quorums that adapt to transaction context, address and contract whitelisting, velocity limits, and time locks are enforced below the API, in the same layer that produces signatures, so they cannot be bypassed even if credentials or API keys are compromised. Transactions are screened before signing through native integrations with Chainalysis, Elliptic, Global Ledger, and Notabene. Custody and approval models can be adapted per market without re-architecting, giving institutions a durable compliance backbone across MiCA, DORA, and GDPR in Europe, and OCC, NYDFS, FCA, FINMA, MAS, VARA, HKMA, and JFSA elsewhere. Every action is cryptographically signed, fully auditable, and exportable into existing GRC and SIEM systems.
4. Bank-grade, zero-trust security. The platform is built so that no single device, system, or person can move assets alone. Private keys are never assembled: they exist only as encrypted shares across independent signers, enforced through MPC or HSM-based key management, PKI-based controls, fine-grained IAM and RBAC, and hardware-backed authentication. To move funds, an attacker would have to breach multiple independent systems within a narrow window, defeat the operator’s authentication, and bypass the policy engine, all without tripping the alerting layered through the stack. DFNS is SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001, 27017, and 27018 certified, with zero breaches and zero key losses since inception.
5. Performance, scale, and availability for mission-critical operations. Ethereum signing uses ECDSA over secp256k1, produced through KU23, our proprietary threshold protocol, at sub-second latency. A distributed, active-active architecture delivers high throughput and continuous availability, reliably scaling to billions in assets and the signing volume of a payment processor at peak or an exchange processing withdrawals under load. Signing latency is the difference between a product that works and one that stalls.
6. Flexible deployment, fast delivery, and pricing that scales predictably. Run DFNS as SaaS, hybrid, or fully on-premise, or connect your own HSMs (Thales, Securosys, IBM CryptoExpress or LinuxONE) and TEE-based deployments to meet data-residency and regulatory constraints, the same MPC layer across every model, so you can migrate as requirements evolve without changing a line of integration code. The team is consistently among the fastest to support new networks and protocols, so institutions launch earlier. And pricing is a transparent subscription and licensing model: no basis points on assets under custody, no transaction-volume fees, with yearly or multi-year enterprise licenses covering unlimited objects and transactions.

Comprehensive Ethereum support, end-to-end

For a complete walkthrough, see the EVM networks guide, the EVM signing reference, and the Fee Sponsors documentation. The summary below covers what DFNS supports across Ethereum and EVM networks today.

Token transfers and standards

DFNS provides native support across the token standards institutions actually use:

• Native tokens (kind: Native), with amounts denominated in wei
• ERC-20, the standard for fungible tokens and the format of every major stablecoin
• ERC-721 non-fungible tokens
• ERC-1155 multi-token contracts
• ERC-3643 for regulated, permissioned securities, and ERC-1400 for security tokens
• ERC-7984 Confidential Tokens (kind: Erc7984), with FHE-encrypted balances via Zama and decryption delegation to DFNS, for institutions that need onchain confidentiality over token amounts

Through Bring Your Own ABI (BYOABI), you are not limited to a fixed list. Import any smart contract by its ABI and interact with its specific functions directly through the API or the dashboard. If it exists on an EVM chain, you can call it.

Smart contract interactions

• Arbitrary contract calls via kind: Transaction on the Broadcast endpoint
• BYOABI, to interact with any contract using its ABI
• Fee-sponsored contract calls via kind: UserOperations

Signing standards

Ethereum signing at DFNS is built around the standards the ecosystem runs on:

• EIP-191 for personal_sign messages
• EIP-712 for structured, typed data signing, the standard behind readable approvals and most institutional signing flows
• EIP-7702 for type 4 set-code transaction authorization tuples, the Pectra-era primitive that lets an account adopt smart contract behavior
• Raw transactions, in hex-encoded or JSON object format

Account abstraction and gas sponsorship

This is one of the areas where Ethereum has moved fastest, and where DFNS has invested heavily:

• ERC-4337 UserOperations, with integrations for Biconomy, Safe, and ZeroDev
• EIP-7702 smart account flows, signing the set-code authorizations that let an EOA act as a smart account
• ERC-2771 meta-transactions, compatible with GSN, Biconomy, and Gelato
• Fee Sponsorship, so you can subsidize gas for your users and they never need to hold the native token to transact. Fee sponsorship is supported on Ethereum, Polygon, Base, Arbitrum, Optimism, BSC, and more

For consumer-facing products, this is the difference between an onboarding flow that asks a new user to first acquire ETH for gas and one where the application sponsors it invisibly.

Gas and fee management

• EIP-1559 fee priority control, with Slow, Standard, and Fast settings
• Fee estimation through the Estimate Fees API, handling base and priority fee calculation so transactions are neither overpriced nor at risk of stalling

Nonce and transaction management

The unglamorous half of EVM infrastructure, and where most production failures actually happen:

• Deterministic, atomic nonce allocation under concurrency, so high-throughput signing does not collide
• Speed up and cancel for pending transactions, through nonce replacement
• Abort for stuck transactions, without on-chain interaction

DeFi and swaps

• Uniswap support, covering both UniswapClassic and UniswapX, for same-chain EVM token swaps on Ethereum, Polygon, Base, Arbitrum, BSC, Avalanche, Celo, and more

MEV protection

For sensitive operations like large swaps or token mints, DFNS integrates with Flashbots Protect and MEV-Blocker to submit transactions through private mempools, protecting your flows from front-running and sandwich attacks. On a public mempool, a large trade is visible before it confirms, and adversaries can extract value by ordering their own transactions around it. Private submission closes that window.

Execution security

• EIP-155 chain ID binding, to prevent cross-chain replay attacks, for example between Ethereum and Ethereum Classic
• EIP-55 mixed-case checksum validation on every destination address before signing, to catch malformed or mistyped addresses

Staking

• ETH staking through our Figment integration, so institutions can stake ETH and earn the network yield that now underpins the staking ETF category, under the same custody and policy controls as the rest of their portfolio

Indexing, history, and webhooks

Ethereum and the major EVM networks are Tier-1 at DFNS, which means the full indexing pipeline runs on every wallet: confirmed balances by asset, full transaction history with metadata for reconciliation, and webhooks so your back office reacts to chain events in real time rather than polling. Every mutating endpoint accepts an externalId for idempotency, so retries never cause double-broadcasts.

Engineering deep dive: the cryptography behind it

A wallet platform is only as good as the cryptography it sits on. DFNS runs an in-house research team that designs, implements, and continuously vets the protocols our customers rely on. A few things worth knowing about what is underneath Ethereum signing:

1. KU25. Our proprietary threshold ECDSA signing protocol, published as tecdh in the Communications in Cryptology venue. It produces signatures byte-for-byte indistinguishable from a single-key ECDSA signature, so an Ethereum wallet on DFNS looks like any other wallet on chain, while internally requiring the cooperation of multiple independent signers to produce any signature. KU25 is materially faster than its predecessors on the workloads our customers run, which is why we sustain sub-second EVM signing at institutional throughput.
2. Continuous protocol vetting. We have publicly disclosed and patched vulnerabilities in widely deployed MPC protocols, including issues affecting the broader industry’s CGGMP21 implementations. We treat MPC the way a serious cryptography practice should: assume protocols are wrong until proven right, run continuous adversarial review, and publish what we find.
3. No-key-assembly invariant. At no point in the lifecycle of a DFNS wallet, creation, signing, backup, recovery, or export, is the full private key materialized in any single environment. Key creation is a distributed key generation protocol, signing is a distributed signing protocol, and even authorized export uses a threshold protocol requiring the same independent signers. There is no moment where compromising one server, process, or administrator yields the key.
4. Independent signer environments. Each MPC signer runs in a separate, hardened environment with its own credentials, attestation, and isolation. In our managed deployment these span Tier 3+ and Tier 4 data centers across multiple regions; in hybrid and on-prem deployments, customers control where each signer lives.
5. Performance. DFNS delivers up to 20 ECDSA signatures and hundreds of key generations per second, with substantially higher throughput on EdDSA. For an EVM operation, that is ample headroom for millions of customer wallets and the corresponding signing volume.

Security architecture beyond the cryptography

Cryptography is necessary but not sufficient. The platform around it matters just as much.

Passkeys for authentication. User access is gated by passkeys built on the FIDO2 and WebAuthn standard, the same phishing-resistant approach backed by Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Yubico. There are no passwords to steal, no SMS codes to intercept, no shared secrets on a server. The most common path to a custody breach is not breaking the cryptography, it is phishing an employee. Passkeys close that door.

Four deployment models. Fully managed, where DFNS operates the MPC signing network in our certified infrastructure across Tier 3+ and Tier 4 data centers in the region of your choice. Hybrid, where you keep one or more MPC shares on your own infrastructure, including confidential computing enclaves like AWS Nitro or IBM Hyper Protect, and no transaction signs without your share. On-premise, where DFNS deploys the full signing stack inside your perimeter with no external signing dependency. And Bring Your Own HSM, connecting natively to IBM, Thales, Securosys, and other FIPS-compliant hardware through PKCS#11, keeping cryptographic material inside your own root of trust.

Audits and certifications. SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, 27017, 27018, and continuous third-party penetration testing by leading firms, covering cryptography, code, and full-system reviews, in both white-box and black-box engagements.

Insurance. Crime, cyber-attack, and errors-and-omissions coverage in partnership with Beazley and Munich Re. A security promise that does not pay out is not really a security promise.

Availability. 99.997% uptime since 2022. Active-active, geographically distributed RPC infrastructure with automatic failover keeps EVM networks reachable from your wallets even when individual nodes or regions go down. Status is published live at status.dfns.co.

Disaster recovery. Independent recovery paths at every layer. Customers in hybrid and on-prem deployments can recover wallets even in scenarios where DFNS as a company ceases to operate. We treat that as a feature, not an awkward edge case.

Governance for Ethereum operations

Securing the key is necessary; controlling what can be done with it is just as important, and on Ethereum it is harder, because a signature is not only a transfer. It can be an approval that lets a contract move your tokens, a swap, a contract deployment, or a delegation. DFNS Wallet Entitlement Management is a programmable rule engine that runs before any signature is produced. For an Ethereum operation, this typically looks like:

• Approval quorums. High-value transfers and contract interactions require sign-off from N of M operators across treasury, compliance, and operations, with the quorum varying by amount, destination, contract, time, or originating wallet.
• Address and contract whitelisting. Outgoing transfers and contract calls can be restricted to a curated list of addresses and contracts. New entries are themselves subject to a quorum, so a compromised operator account cannot route funds to a new destination alone.
• Velocity limits. Caps on value moved per hour, day, or wallet, with separate ceilings for whitelisted versus non-whitelisted destinations. This is the single most effective control against a worst-case account compromise.
• Time locks. Delays on large transfers, giving security and compliance a window to intervene before signing.
• KYT-gated transfers. Outgoing transfers are screened against Chainalysis, Elliptic, or Global Ledger risk scores, blocking flows to sanctioned or high-risk counterparties before they are signed.
• Travel Rule. Through our Notabene integration, originator and beneficiary information is exchanged automatically for VASP-to-VASP transfers above the regulatory threshold.
• Granular roles and permissions. Your existing segregation of duties translated directly into DFNS roles.

Because these policies live below the API surface, in the same MPC layer that produces signatures, they cannot be bypassed even with compromised credentials. From a regulator’s standpoint, this is the difference between an institution that says it has controls and one that can prove it.

Ethereum use cases at institutional scale

Ethereum is not one product. It is the base layer for most of regulated onchain finance. The important pattern is that the same wallet infrastructure powers all of these, so the institution that builds well once does not rebuild for the next product.

1. Stablecoin issuance and payments

Ethereum and its L2s carry the majority of regulated stablecoin supply, and stablecoins are the single largest onchain use case by volume. Institutions use DFNS to issue stablecoins, manage reserves and treasury, and move value across borders in seconds. The per-transaction controls, fee sponsorship so end users never touch gas, and KYT screening on every flow are exactly what a regulated issuer or payment provider needs. For issuers, ERC-3643 and ERC-1400 support extends the same rails to permissioned and regulated token designs.

2. Tokenization of real-world assets

Ethereum is the dominant settlement layer for tokenized assets, from money market funds and treasuries to private credit and other instruments. Issuing and servicing a tokenized asset means minting, transferring, enforcing transfer restrictions, processing redemptions, and maintaining an auditable record of every holder action. DFNS provides the wallet, key, and policy layer for that lifecycle, with BYOABI to interact with any issuance or registry contract and the Tokenization Engine to manage assets end to end.

3. DeFi access and onchain treasury

Prime brokers, funds, and corporates increasingly deploy capital into onchain venues for yield, liquidity, or hedging. The risk is operational: a single malicious or mistaken approval can drain a position. DFNS gates every swap, approval, and contract interaction through policy, integrates Uniswap for same-chain swaps, and adds MEV protection through Flashbots Protect and MEV-Blocker so large trades are not front-run. Treasury teams get DeFi access with the controls and audit trail their mandate requires.

4. Centralized exchange operations

Exchanges and OTC desks run the most demanding EVM profile: large numbers of customer deposit addresses, high withdrawal throughput, tight signing latency, and hot, warm, and cold tiers across jurisdictions. DFNS supports this end to end, with programmatic per-customer addresses, high-throughput signing via KU23, velocity limits and KYT on withdrawal flows, and policy-driven inter-tier sweeps. For exchanges migrating off legacy or in-house systems, DFNS provides key import and export through threshold protocols and a documented migration path.

5. Embedded consumer wallets with account abstraction

Fintechs and consumer applications want wallets that feel like a modern app. Account abstraction is what makes that possible, and it is where DFNS has invested heavily. With ERC-4337, EIP-7702, and fee sponsorship, an application can offer gasless transactions, batched actions, session keys, and social-style recovery, while the underlying keys remain under MPC security. The end user never sees gas or seed phrases; the institution retains custody and control.

6. ETH staking and staked-ETH products

With staking ETFs now live and staking rewards classified as non-securities in the United States, productive ETH has become an institutional product category in its own right. Through our Figment integration, institutions can stake ETH under the same custody, policy, and audit controls as the rest of their portfolio, supporting treasury yield strategies and the infrastructure behind staked-ETH investment products.

7. Onchain credit and collateral

Ethereum is the primary venue for onchain lending and collateralized credit. The custody requirement is subtle: the lender needs assurance the borrower cannot move pledged collateral while a loan is outstanding, the borrower needs assurance the lender cannot move it except under defined conditions, and both need an independent, auditable record. DFNS supports this through programmatic multi-party arrangements where lender, borrower, and an optional agent each hold a passkey, and margin calls and liquidations execute through pre-defined policy paths rather than manual intervention.

8. Agentic and automated wallets

A growing class of applications puts an automated agent or service in the signing path: automated treasury management, scheduled settlement, AI-driven execution. These flows have no human present at signing time, which makes policy enforcement essential rather than optional. DFNS supports programmatic service accounts that sign under strict, infrastructure-level policy, so an automated wallet can act continuously while velocity limits, whitelists, and KYT keep it inside its mandate.

Roadmap: where Ethereum support is heading next

Ethereum’s own roadmap is moving toward native account abstraction, cheaper Layer 2 settlement, and improved interoperability, and DFNS is building to meet it. Our near-term focus is deepening account abstraction support as EIP-7702 adoption matures and the next protocol upgrade brings smart-account behavior closer to the base layer, broadening native integrations across the account-abstraction and DeFi ecosystem, and expanding coverage and Tier-1 indexing across the growing set of EVM Layer 2s. The same principle that guides everything we build applies here: whatever an institution adopts on Ethereum should extend across the EVM ecosystem under one set of controls, without re-architecting.

If any of these are on your near-term roadmap, talk to us.

What’s next in this series

Bitcoin was the origin chain, and Ethereum is the chain on which most onchain finance is being built. The next post will cover Canton, the network purpose-built for institutional finance, and arguably the clearest case so far of regulated capital markets actually moving onchain.

In December 2025, DTCC, the premier post-trade market infrastructure for global financial services, partnered with Digital Asset to tokenize DTC-custodied U.S. Treasury securities on the Canton Network, following DTCC’s receipt of a No-Action Letter from the SEC. This is the institution that in 2024 processed securities transactions valued at $3.7 quadrillion. The network has drawn production and announced deployments from Broadridge, DTCC, and J.P. Morgan across repo, collateral, tokenized Treasuries, tokenized bank deposits, and payments infrastructure. In November 2025, Franklin Templeton expanded its Benji platform onto the network, and momentum continued into 2026 with Kinexys by J.P. Morgan integrating JPM Coin, HSBC piloting tokenized deposits, and Visa joining as a Super Validator. Its public mainnet, launched in 2024, now underpins more than 150 live or emerging applications, and Digital Asset works with more than 700 ecosystem participants to make Canton core infrastructure for global finance. The institutional conviction behind it shows up in capital as well as workflows: recent funding rounds have drawn BNY Mellon, Nasdaq, S&P Global, Tradeweb, and DRW.

What sets Canton apart for these institutions is its architecture: the ability to transact and settle with sub-transaction privacy, so positions are never exposed to competitors, combined with atomic settlement across assets and cash. We’ll cover what Canton is, how its privacy and settlement model works, the institutional use cases it is already powering, what DFNS supports for it, and where we are taking it next. Further network deep dives will follow.

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