Digital Asset, the company behind the Canton Network, is in advanced talks for a funding round led by a16z crypto that targets a $2 billion valuation, according to a Bloomberg report cited by CoinDesk on May 11, 2026. The raise size and final terms were not disclosed in the initial report.
The valuation lands at a moment when bitcoin trades at $81,011 and ether at $2,336, with the Fear and Greed Index sitting at a neutral 50 as of the same morning. Tokenization is one of the few corners of crypto pulling consistent institutional capital while public-chain narratives stall.
Canton's pitch to banks
Canton Network is a privacy-focused blockchain designed for regulated financial institutions. Each application on Canton can run as a separate, permissioned subnet, with cryptographic controls that let banks settle on a shared ledger without exposing trade details, counterparties, or holdings to other participants.
That design is the reason Goldman Sachs, BNY Mellon, BlackRock, Cboe, and roughly two dozen other large financial firms have piloted assets on Canton over the past two years. The pitch is straightforward: institutions want the settlement benefits of distributed ledgers, but not the radical transparency of Ethereum or Solana, where every position and counterparty is visible on-chain.
The a16z lead is notable because the firm has historically backed public, permissionless infrastructure. A check at a $2 billion valuation into a privacy-first, institution-only network signals that a16z sees parallel rails forming for regulated finance rather than a single winner-take-all chain.
The tokenization tailwind
The raise lands inside a broader tokenization run. RWA.xyz data covered earlier this month showed tokenized real-world assets crossed $30 billion in total market value, a tenfold increase over two years. Tokenized gold spot volume in Q1 2026 already exceeded all of 2025. On BNB Chain alone, tokenized US Treasuries crossed $3.5 billion in market cap.
Canton sits next to public-chain offerings in that mix, but its growth is being measured in settlement notional rather than retail TVL. Digital Asset has previously cited pilots covering hundreds of billions of dollars in repo, collateral, and fund administration flows, although those volumes are not the same as live capital running through the chain every day.
For a16z, the bet is that even a fraction of regulated settlement migrating onto Canton would justify a $2 billion entry price. For Digital Asset, the round resets it from a quiet enterprise-software vendor to a venture-backed blockchain platform competing for the same institutional budget that public-chain teams now chase.
The privacy thesis behind the bet
Public-chain tokenization projects have argued that transparency is a feature, not a bug. Auditors, regulators, and counterparties can verify positions in real time. Canton's investors are buying the opposite thesis: that banks will pay a premium to settle on infrastructure where their inventory, customer book, and trading flow remain confidential.
Both positions can be right in different segments. Retail-facing stablecoins, tokenized funds aimed at individuals, and on-chain credit markets benefit from open ledgers. Interbank repo, dealer-to-dealer collateral movement, and bilateral derivatives benefit from the opposite. The question for a $2 billion bet is how much of the regulated stack chooses the second path.
That same divide is playing out in the payments and card layer too, where Sui's plan to build confidential transactions into a public chain is one attempted bridge between the two camps.
Open questions
Three things will determine whether the valuation holds. First, how much of the pilot volume Canton's bank participants have advertised actually settles on Canton in production, and on what timeline. Second, whether US and EU regulators treat permissioned bank-operated chains the same way they treat tokenized funds on public chains. Third, whether the CC token that Digital Asset launched in 2024 to coordinate the network captures durable economic value, or remains a coordination utility that does not accrue revenue to holders.
None of those are resolved. The round, if it closes at the reported terms, is a vote of confidence on direction more than on a single number.
Overview
Bloomberg reports a16z crypto is leading a funding round that values Digital Asset, operator of the bank-focused Canton Network, at $2 billion. The deal size and final close are not yet public. The raise lines up with a broader institutional tokenization wave, but commits venture capital to a privacy-first, permissioned model rather than a public-chain settlement layer. Watch for confirmed terms, named co-investors, and any disclosure of live settlement volume in the weeks ahead.
