Digital Asset Raises $100M as Banks Move $400B Daily Volume Off Public Chains

Published by James Harris on June 12, 2026June 12, 2026

Andreessen Horowitz’s crypto arm has put $100 million into Digital Asset, the company behind Canton, a permissioned public blockchain that already processes real volume for JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, Broadridge, and DTCC. The bet is not on a future use case. It is on infrastructure that is already running.

The investment lands at a specific moment in the regulatory calendar. The GENIUS Act is now law, and the CLARITY Act is moving through Congress, giving banks their first workable framework for on-chain activity. That regulatory clarity matters more than the $100 million figure, because it removes the compliance ambiguity that kept institutional treasury and settlement operations off public rails entirely. The privacy angle is the part that gets framed as a philosophical shift, but the real driver is competitive intelligence: banks do not want deposit flows, counterparty relationships, or repo volumes visible to every node on a public chain. Broadridge already runs more than $400 billion in daily U.S. Treasury repo through a Canton subnet. That is not a pilot.

Canton’s architecture is the distinction most coverage flattens. Unlike Monero or Zcash, which provide privacy by obscuring transaction data from everyone, Canton is designed so each participant sees only what is relevant to their position in a given transaction. The privacy is selective and permissioned, which is exactly what regulated institutions require and exactly what retail-oriented privacy coins cannot offer.

The broader competitive pressure here falls on Ethereum and its institutional layer-2 ambitions. Projects like Canton, along with Circle’s Arc and Stripe-backed Tempo (which together with Canton have raised over $1 billion combined at valuations exceeding $10 billion), are making a direct argument that general-purpose public blockchains are architecturally mismatched with institutional finance. If that argument lands, the tokenized asset market, currently estimated in the low hundreds of billions, accretes to purpose-built permissioned networks rather than to Ethereum-based infrastructure. For Ethereum validators and L2 operators, the fee revenue implications are not trivial.

Canton’s token, CC, carries a $6.3 billion market cap with no maximum supply cap and a current price around $0.16, which is a combination that institutional partners will largely ignore but that retail participants should understand before treating governance token exposure as equivalent to equity in the underlying network.