Digital Asset Targets $2B Valuation in a16z-Led $300M Raise

Digital Asset Holdings, the company behind the Canton Network blockchain, is raising roughly $300 million at a $2 billion valuation in a round led by Andreessen Horowitz's a16z crypto, according to Bloomberg. Investment bank FT Partners is advising on the deal, which sources said is expected to close in the coming weeks with the final amount subject to change.

Canton Network is a privacy-enabled blockchain built to connect financial institutions and their tokenized assets across permissioned, interoperable applications. The platform's most consequential proof point came in February, when a group of global banks completed the first cross-border intraday repurchase agreement using tokenized British government bonds — the first time digital versions of gilts, a roughly $2 trillion market, had been used in a cross-border intraday repo. The current raise follows an estimated $50 million strategic investment in late 2025 from BNY Mellon and Nasdaq, alongside existing backers DRW and Citadel Securities.

Why it matters

Canton has been quietly assembling the deepest TradFi bench in crypto infrastructure: BNY, Nasdaq, DRW and Citadel Securities already on the cap table, with a16z crypto now joining as the dedicated crypto-native investor. For a16z, participation would be its first deployment from the $2.2 billion crypto fund it closed a week ago — capital that takes the firm's total crypto commitments to just under $10 billion across five funds. The combination is unusual: the round is large for a permissioned-chain operator, but the investor mix signals that the institutional tokenization thesis is graduating from pilots to a category someone is willing to underwrite at venture scale.

Market impact

The $2 billion valuation is roughly 40x the prior $50 million strategic round from late 2025, repricing Canton's institutional infrastructure business inside a single funding cycle. For the wider tokenization narrative, the read is straightforward: when a16z writes a check on top of BNY and Nasdaq, the proof-of-concept phase for real-world asset chains is closing.