a16z leads $355M equity round into Canton developer Digital Asset at reported $2B valuation

a16z crypto has led a $355 million equity round into Digital Asset, the firm behind the Canton Network, with participation from a broad mix of TradFi and crypto institutions including an Abu Dhabi Investment Authority subsidiary, Apollo Funds, BNP Paribas, Broadridge, Citadel Securities, CME Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, HSBC, S&P Global, SBI Group, SoFi and Tradeweb. Bloomberg previously reported the raise was being done at a $2 billion valuation, and Digital Asset CEO Yuval Rooz said investors in this round received equity rather than token allocations.

Rooz framed the capital as balance sheet expansion for an already profitable business, saying the funding gives Digital Asset the “freedom to do M&A, to participate in interesting projects,” and to help partners build onchain businesses, while explicitly avoiding circular capital commitments “you see in crypto,” such as pledging capital into partners’ funds. Many of the new investors are also prospective Canton users, and Rooz said that “now that we have a really good balance sheet, we can actually invest in these relationships to actually accelerate them moving onchain.”

Canton is positioned as a public, permissionless Layer 1 with configurable privacy features tailored for institutional finance, and it runs applications written in Digital Asset’s open-source smart contract language Daml. The network claims to have supported issuance of $6 trillion in tokenized assets and is already being used by players like JPMorgan and DTCC, while Visa joined as a Canton Super Validator in March and added the network to its stablecoin settlement pilot alongside Base, Polygon, Arc and Tempo.

a16z crypto General Partner Ali Yahya said in a statement that “Digital Asset has built one of the clearest examples of blockchain product-market fit in regulated finance,” adding that the firm views the company as “building foundational infrastructure for the next generation of financial markets.” The deal follows Andreessen Horowitz’s close of a $2.2 billion fifth crypto fund and extends a funding arc that saw Digital Asset raise $135 million in June 2025 and $50 million in December 2025 from backers including DRW, Tradeweb, Goldman Sachs, Citadel Securities, DTCC, BNY Mellon, Nasdaq and iCapital.

The new round further consolidates Canton’s position in the institutional blockchain stack at a time when tokenization and privacy-preserving settlement rails are moving from pilots to production. With fresh capital earmarked for strategic partnerships and potential acquisitions, the key watch points will be which large-market infrastructure projects Digital Asset chooses to back, and how quickly its blue-chip investor base transitions from pilots to scaled volumes on Canton.