There's a version of institutional blockchain adoption that's been promised for years: banks settling trades onchain, funds issuing tokenized shares to investors, collateral moving between counterparties in real time. The infrastructure to actually do this has mostly existed in pieces. What's been missing is an integrated stack for those pieces to connect to the people who need to use them.
Today, we are glad to announce that WalletConnect has added support for Canton Network, opening up access to institutional-grade apps and tokenized real world assets to millions of users.
This integration enables:
- Seamless connectivity - any WalletConnect-enabled wallet can connect with any supported Canton application
- Simplified development - integrate once to access a broad ecosystem of wallets and applications on Canton
- Increased onboarding conversion - give users the flexibility to choose their preferred wallet or custody providers
- Cross-device authentication - stay connected across apps, devices, and sessions - no more constant reconnects
- Faster, secure authentication - one-click signatures enable streamlined logins
Canton Network: a public L1 blockchain with institutional-grade privacy
Canton, originally built by Digital Asset, was designed with institutional finance needs in mind from the start. Trusted by financial and crypto leaders alike - from Goldman Sachs and BNP Paribas, to DTCC and Circle, Canton is where real-world finance and institutional-grade crypto operate together. Network participants utilize the network’s native token, Canton Coin, to pay transaction fees and earn rewards, aligning incentives across a growing ecosystem. Since launch, a wide range of assets have been issued natively on Canton, leveraging its privacy-preserving architecture to drive new utility across its ecosystem - from Franklin Templeton's Benji money market fund to JPMorgan's Deposit Token, and Circle's USDCx to Brale's SBC.
The default assumption in public blockchain design is that transparency is good. And for a lot of use cases, it is. However, this does not reflect how real-world institutional finance works.Institutional finance operates under legal disclosure obligations, competitive sensitivities, and compliance regimes that make total on-chain transparency challenging.
Rather than retrofitting privacy onto a transparent base layer, Canton's privacy is built into the L1 and mirrors how real finance works, enabling data to be shared on a"need-to-know" basis: only the parties involved in a transaction can see its details. Nobody else.
The other thing Canton gets right is interoperability between independent systems. Institutional finance doesn't run on one ledger. It runs on dozens of siloed platforms, across multiple custodians, under different regulatory frameworks. Canton embeds composability directly into the protocol, so apps can connect and transact atomically by design. It preserves the DeFi-like composability that is the killer feature of public blockchains. Combined with control over privacy it creates an ecosystem that shifts gears, powering use cases such as 24/7 liquidity and financing, collateral mobility, and onchain payments with privacy. Today, over $350bn of onchain assets move daily across the network.
Expanding Access to Institutional-Grade Apps
Canton Network’s design addresses the core barriers to bringing institutional assets and volumes onchain. The next step is making sure that infrastructure is more easily accessible to users.
Consumer apps have long benefitted from standardized connectivity layers like WalletConnect, enabling seamless access across wallets and applications. With this integration, that same level of accessibility is now extended to institutional-grade applications built on Canton - without relying on bespoke integrations or fragmented onboarding flows.
That's the gap WalletConnect fills through this integration.
The Connectivity Layer That Already Exists
WalletConnect is the wallet network that connects wallets to dApps. Over 700+ wallets support it. Tens of thousands of apps have integrated it. When someone taps "connect wallet" on an app and scans a QR code, there's a good chance WalletConnect is running underneath.
For a developer building on Canton, that existing ecosystem is enormously valuable. With this integration, WalletConnect opens up access for its millions of users to Canton’s growing ecosystem of applications and tokenized real-world assets from institutional grade stablecoins, tokenized deposits and onchain securities to privacy-enabled DeFi protocols, trading venues and prediction markets. Developers only need to integrate WalletConnect once, to gain access to a global ecosystem.
What You Can Actually Build With Both
The practical combination is what makes this interesting. Canton's privacy model and synchronization protocol handle the institutional-grade on-chain logic. WalletConnect complements this by providing the connectivity layer that enables users and systems to connect to it. Some of the institutional-grade apps, assets and use cases uniquely finding traction on Canton today include:
24/7 collateral mobility and financing
- Assets can be composed and mobilized across Canton’s privacy preserving applications. Participants in the ecosystem unlock instant collateral transfers, atomic swaps, on-demand stablecoin mint/redeem, and 24/7 continuous financing for clients - capital optimized, without revealing strategies.
Privacy-enabled crypto assets
- Wrapped BTC, ETH, and other crypto assets held with institutional custody providers can now be seamlessly connected to Canton applications - expanding their utility as collateral within institutional workflows, as well as enabling participation in a new breed of privacy-preserving DeFi apps, including: lending and borrowing protocols, prediction markets, and more.
Onchain payments with privacy
- Wallets and custodians can now facilitate private, real-time payment and settlement flows using stablecoins, tokenized deposits and other forms of onchain cash. On Canton, these transactions operate on the basis of “need-to-know” privacy - ensuring that financial activity is not broadcast for all to see. This unlocks a wide range of use cases, from secure payroll and treasury operations, to global, real-time settlement for financial markets.
WalletConnect for Institutions
WalletConnect is set to scale to new heights with its integration on Canton, and Canton unlocks access to hundreds of millions of users and thousands of institutions. Already trusted as a secure connectivity layer through which billions of dollars of institutional capital flow, WalletConnect is purpose-built for institutional-grade onchain access, where security isn’t just a feature, it’s a requirement.
From the ground up, WalletConnect ensures that private keys are never exposed, sessions are end-to-end encrypted, and institutions retain full control over custody and signing authority. It introduces no additional counterparty risk, as it never holds funds or facilitates asset transfers, while features like Travel Rule–ready authorization and the Verify API provide built-in compliance and protection against malicious interactions.
Combined with Canton’s privacy-first, interoperable infrastructure, WalletConnect enables institutions to securely connect to onchain systems using the wallets and custody solutions they already trust, without compromising on control, compliance, or user experience. Together, they form the foundation for a new phase of institutional adoption: secure, scalable, and accessible by design.
Why This Moment
The next phase of institutional digital assets is about accessibility, and whether investors can use it with wallets they already trust.
Canton answers the infrastructure side of that question better than anything else currently available. WalletConnect answers the connectivity and distribution side. Used together, they close the loop for institutional-grade onchain access.