Canton Network developer Digital Asset eyes $300 million raise at $2 billion valuation, led by a16z crypto: Bloomberg

Digital Asset Holdings, the firm behind the institutional blockchain Canton Network, is raising approximately $300 million at a valuation of around $2 billion, with a16z crypto leading the round, Bloomberg reported on Sunday, citing people familiar with the matter.

The financing is expected to close in the coming weeks, though the final amount could still change, per the report. Neither Digital Asset nor a16z responded to Bloomberg’s requests for comment.

The round would mark a significant step up from the company’s prior fundraising. Digital Asset raised $135 million in June 2025 in a round led by DRW Venture Capital and Tradeweb Markets, with participation from Goldman Sachs, Citadel Securities, DTCC, and others. That was followed by a $50 million raise in December 2025 from BNY Mellon, Nasdaq, S&P Global, and iCapital, as Bloomberg reported at the time.

Canton Network is a public, permissionless Layer 1 blockchain built with configurable privacy features aimed at institutional finance. The network supports applications written in Digital Asset’s open-source smart contract language, Daml, and is designed to enable tokenized asset workflows across multiple parties while keeping transaction data confidential.

The network has picked up significant institutional traction over the past year. Visa became a Canton Super Validator in March, marking the payments giant’s first-ever blockchain governance proposal. More than $6 trillion in tokenized assets have been issued or processed on the network, according to prior reporting. Visa also added Canton to its stablecoin settlement pilot in late April, alongside rival networks Base, Polygon, Arc, and Tempo.

Canton’s growing ecosystem has also drawn activity beyond its core institutional base. In November, then-Nasdaq-listed Tharimmune, now Canton Strategic Holdings raised $540 million to build a Canton Coin treasury, with backing from DRW, ARK Invest, Kraken, and others. And earlier in March, a project called Zenith completed atomic swaps between the Canton Network and an EVM-compatible environment, opening a potential bridge to the broader Ethereum developer ecosystem.

For a16z crypto, the investment would come less than a week after the firm announced it had raised $2.2 billion for its fifth crypto fund, bringing its total dedicated crypto capital to roughly $10 billion across five vehicles. The firm has previously pointed to privacy as a key competitive differentiator for blockchains, with general partner Ali Yahya writing in January that it is the critical missing feature preventing global finance from fully moving onchain.

That thesis aligns neatly with Canton’s pitch. Unlike Ethereum or Solana, Canton offers protocol-level privacy and confidentiality guarantees, a feature that its backers argue is essential for bringing institutions with trade secrets onto public blockchains.

The broader crypto venture landscape remains mixed. While large funds continue to raise capital, with Haun Ventures closing a $1 billion raise last week, overall deal counts have declined sharply. Quarterly venture investments fell to just 97 in Q1 2026 from 427 in the same quarter the prior year, according to The Block’s reporting. Some funds that have historically been among the biggest crypto backers are increasingly turning their attention to AI and robotics, Bloomberg noted in its report.

Digital Asset is backed by DRW Holdings and Citadel Securities, among other trading firms and Wall Street banks.

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