DTCC Taps Canton Network to Test Tokenized Treasuries

The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC) announced that it has selected the Canton Network to tokenize a subset of the U.S. Treasury securities it holds, highlighting the platform’s privacy features amid a rising debate over financial confidentiality in digital assets.

The pilot, scheduled for the first half of 2026, will allow DTCC for the first time to mint Treasuries on the Canton Network, a Layer 1 blockchain designed for banks, exchanges, and other financial infrastructure. The process will employ DTCC’s ComposerX platforms, according to a press release from DTCC.

The partnership serves as an example of one way institutional plays are looking to adopt blockchain technology for efficiency, but without compromising confidentiality. Yuval Rooz, co-founder and CEO of Digital Asset, the firm behind Canton, said that the L1 was chosen because most public blockchains cannot meet the confidentiality needs of larger market participants.

“When a market participant – like a market maker or bank/broker dealer or mutual fund – is trading Treasuries, they can't have their positions visible to the entire world in real time,” Rooz told The Defiant, adding:

“Canton was purpose-built for institutional finance, with configurable privacy at the protocol level, enabling firms to transact on shared infrastructure while maintaining the confidentiality their business models require.”

Instead of using zero-knowledge proofs to maintain privacy and confidentiality, Canton relies on different technology to achieve what it calls “selective disclosure.”

Canton is currently the 48th-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, with $2.7 billion. Its native asset, CC, is up over 6% today on the news, trading near $0.075.

the-defiant — CC 24-hour price chart. Source: CoinGecko

Rooz added that Canton provides a suite of benefits such as “atomic settlement,” shared source of truth, and reduced reconciliation, all “without forcing regulated firms to give up the confidentiality their business models depend on.”

Calls for Privacy

The move comes at a time when privacy in the decentralized finance sector is being heavily debated.

Earlier this week, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Commissioner Hester Peirce and other experts at a Crypto Task Force roundtable argued that privacy is key to broader adoption of digital assets. Peirce added that protecting financial privacy should be the norm, not a sign of wrongdoing, and that over-surveillance risks slowing adoption of blockchain and crypto technology.

Today’s news comes a few days after the DTCC’s received a no-action letter from the SEC allowing the firm to test services that create digital versions of assets it already holds. Rooz said that while specifics haven't been publicly revealed just yet, the DTCC is starting with a subset of Treasuries custodied at the DTCC.

“That said, the initial MVP will be a controlled production environment, so don't expect cross-chain movement on day one,” he concluded. “The roadmap is multi-year, and transferability across platforms will likely expand as regulatory clarity and client demand evolve.”

There are currently nearly $9 billion worth of tokenized U.S. Treasuries in circulation, with a little over half of that value on the Ethereum blockchain, according to RWAxyz.