Canton

Canton Network is a blockchain built for regulated financial institutions, whose defining requirement is one most public chains cannot meet: transactions must be verifiable without being visible to everyone. It addresses that with privacy at the transaction level rather than as an overlay.

Institutions cannot publish their trades

A bank will not put counterparties, volumes and terms on a public ledger for competitors to read, and confidentiality obligations frequently make it unlawful. This single requirement has kept regulated finance off public blockchains regardless of any other advantage, and it is the problem the design starts from.

Sub-transaction privacy

Participants see only the parts of a transaction they are party to, while the network still validates the whole. That is a stronger property than encrypting data at rest — it means the ledger enforces confidentiality by construction rather than by policy.

Composability across separate applications

Applications run their own domains yet can transact atomically with each other, so a securities transfer and its cash settlement can complete together or not at all. Delivery-versus-payment is exactly what post-trade infrastructure exists to guarantee, and it is difficult to achieve across separate systems.

Governance by participants

The network is operated by financial institutions rather than by anonymous validators. That is the arrangement regulated participants require and it is a permissioned structure, which should be stated plainly rather than described as decentralised.

What to weigh

A design genuinely aimed at institutional constraints rather than at retail crypto, in a sector where adoption is slow, contractual and difficult to verify from outside.