Crypto takes a very narrow view of the world. And what I mean by that, it kind of says the world needs to look like this and that's it.
Everybody, it's LG here and welcome to the Milk Road Show, the daily crypto show that asks a very dangerous question: What if Wall Street actually figured out how to use the blockchain? Today is February 3rd, 2026, and for years crypto promised to eat Wall Street, but instead Wall Street mostly ignored crypto. It was too public, too messy, and too risky. But quietly, over more than a decade, a different version of the blockchain has been built. One designed for privacy, compliance, and actual institutions. Today, that system is set to move trillions of dollars on chain in the next couple years with names like JP Morgan and DTCC already on board. Joining me today is Yuval Rooz, founder and CEO of Digital Asset, the parent company of the Canton Network, which is one of the only green tokens in the last couple weeks, if you can believe it. And I've been so curious about what the heck is going on over there that we needed to have him on the show and explain to us what's going on behind the scenes.
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Okay, so tell me, let's just dive right into it. Okay, Canton is one of the big question marks for me. One of the things I don't understand. I ask a lot of our guests about it and they mainly just tell me behind the scenes like, listen, just get Yuval on here to explain it. Yuval, very quickly and easy to understand for people like me, what exactly is Canton and what problem are you solving for these institutions that's making them sign on with you?
Sure. So maybe we should start from a point you made in your introduction which I think we'll probably discuss in more detail later on, which is you said Canton has been the only thing that has been green for the last week or so. And maybe another one that is worth highlighting is Hyperliquid. And what's unique about the two things, which is I think that one of the things that I found very compelling when I got into this space a long time ago was this idea that crypto pitched itself as a way for everybody to own a piece of infrastructure that actually generates utility for the world. And the reality is that I think that us as an industry have done a lot of great things in terms of proliferating the technology, explaining why this technology is important. But when you end up thinking about most of the tokens that have been launched or the ones that are already still in existence, not a lot of value gets accrued to the token holders. And for us, one important thing, and we'll talk about how we did that, was to make sure that whatever success we have on Canton, whatever utility we drive on Canton, that value needs to mechanically flow down to the token holders.
Now, I think that to your specific question about what is Canton? Well, I think that the way I think about blockchain is the idea of blockchain is the ability to represent assets natively on chain. As a result of that, those assets have higher velocity. We talk a lot about stablecoins, the ability to move US dollars 24/7 in real time all over the world. That is velocity. Another component of blockchain that is critical is composability. It's the ability to embed and settle an asset against another asset atomically without any settlement risk. Again, 24/7 real time. And those few things have got people really excited about crypto. The idea of asset mobility got people excited. I can now send value all over the world 24/7. The idea of composability created DeFi. I can pledge a token, get a loan. I can swap two assets on a DEX. Those are examples of composability. And when you end up thinking about that in the context of the real world, those are actually two really important problems to solve. As we know today in traditional systems, you can't really move money as efficiently. Although you can stream movies, you can do a lot of things very sophisticated, it still seems that assets have some friction associated with them, especially when you start crossing borders. We use the term in financial services DVP or PVP, delivery versus payment or payment versus payment. And inherently people think about those terms as if those two things happen atomically. They never do. Meaning there's always settlement risks, trade breaks, and things like that that still happen in very large quantities in today's world. So those two features are extremely important.
The problem is that one thing that crypto has neglected is privacy. So as we all know today, every account in crypto is pseudo-anonymous. We can all kind of see, and when you actually look at some of the intelligence offerings on crypto rails, they really know who holds what at any given point of time. I would say that the government agencies are some of the biggest users of said companies and they really know who does what at any given point of time. And as a result of that, when you end up talking about well what would it take to get institutional adoption, when you end up having the conversations with global treasurers or treasurers of publicly traded companies, when you talk about different managers of different business functions, what you find out is they say well asset mobility or asset composability are really really important things for us, but if that means that the rest of the world would know what we do from a financial perspective, no thank you, we'll take the friction. So really what we've done when we launched Canton, and we'll talk about some other things, was really the ability how do I bring privacy on chain. And we should not mistake that for anonymity. So privacy to us is the ability for people that should know about a transaction to see the transaction and those that shouldn't know about the transaction not to see it. And as a result of that, you said regulatory or compliant. If you have any kind of regulatory requirement to meet your compliance standards, you should be able to see all the transactions that you were involved or should be able to monitor. So that's really at a high level one of the most important things we saw at Canton, but there's some other features that are not necessarily technical in nature.
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So is this okay? So you're describing to me a pretty standard like DeFi protocol but with privacy built in, right? And that's largely I guess your competitive advantage here when you're chatting with these institutions and pitching to them that they should be moving their trillions of dollars on Canton instead of other layer ones or L2s or anything like that is that they don't need to worry about privacy. It's built in and it's tailor-made, right? Is that they can kind of customize it as they need on Canton. Tell me a little bit more about that because that sounds like something that's obviously pretty attractive for them.
Sure. The problem, and I say that too many times but I will say it again, is that crypto takes a very narrow view of the world. And what I mean by that, it kind of says the world needs to look like this and that's it. It doesn't allow for heterogeneous kind of approach, meaning the chain has one privacy model, one access model, and if you build a smart contract on it you have to kind of figure out how to work within those constraints. And I think that if you were to take the radical side of the opposite, meaning everything is permissioned, everything is private, well, that's also not a good model. I give an example a lot of times. I talk about the NASDAQ tape, right? You see all the transactions that happen on NASDAQ and you go, 'Wow, there's a lot that is happening here,' but you don't know who's generating that activity. So there's a lot of value for what I would say permissionless information where everybody should have access to that information from an advertising perspective, from a credibility perspective. There's a lot of reasons why you would want certain things not to be private. And then there's a lot of things where you would want them to be private. Like if I have PII, personal identifying information, well, I would probably want that to be private. If I do a transaction on a stablecoin, maybe I want all of those transactions to be public permissionless, meaning everybody should see, kind of like that NASDAQ example, all the transactions. So we don't have this kind of narrow view of the world. We actually think the world has all shades of gray in it for many different reasons. A lot of times people will associate it with regulation and compliance. I actually also think that there's business models that want to have different shades of gray from a business model perspective. Like I can be a completely unregulated business and I would want certain parts of my business to be completely public permissionless and then maybe I would want to have some features that are private permissioned. And I don't have necessarily a concrete example, but what's unique about Canton is that the chain does not dictate to the applications that run on it what should be their worldview, which actually allows for quite a lot of customization at the smart contract level.
So when we see that there are names like JP Morgan and DTCC signing on to Canton, what are they coming on to build exactly? What is DTCC's plan and which parts of it are they using? How does that work? Are they building a separate chain with Canton technology? Are they building directly on Canton? Just take us through that, the onboarding process for these massive companies.
So just maybe for the sake of your audience, DTCC is a central securities depository. They run a clearing house. So they clear transactions. They're also a registry, they own a trust, and today they house roughly a hundred trillion dollars worth of assets all the way from treasuries, US equities, US municipal bonds, and US corporate bonds. And they recently received a no-action relief from the SEC to tokenize their assets and they chose Canton as the first chain to launch on. We don't have an exclusivity with them and eventually they would probably launch on other chains, but currently what they have communicated is Canton is first. So they are building on Canton and really what they're doing is no different than how you should think about a stablecoin issuer. They're introducing an asset class which is currently housed under legacy systems. They're allowing that now to be represented on Canton. So if you wanted to let's say trade US treasuries against stablecoins, now you could do that without having some kind of a wrapper which is currently what you're seeing on most chains. Actually the token would be the equivalent of holding a US treasury at the DTCC. Now you'll be able to hold it on Canton and there's a whole slew of different applications that are coming to production which will allow you to take advantage of the fact that you have US treasuries and hopefully later on other asset classes.
Got it. So what we would see when we're seeing like the tokenization of something, let's say, actually maybe you can disambiguate for me as well because one of the big headlines last week, and this is somewhat different than the DTCC, one of the big headlines last week as gold and silver popped off is how Hyperliquid, you know, two or 3% of the volume on silver globally was on Hyperliquid on like Thursday or Friday when it popped off and it came back down. Is that asset just a tokenized version? Is that just a wrapper of silver? So it's similar to what Canton would do in terms of like it's directly...
Hyperliquid is a pure derivative. It actually has no tying to the underlying. Hyperliquid is very similar to a future contract. You're effectively predicting, gambling, however you want to put it. You're taking a directional trade saying where the price will be in the future. The reason why having tokenized underlying is very valuable even for derivatives is because when you trade derivatives, one of the things that you need, and Hyperliquid is currently only taking collateral in the form of cash. But generally speaking, when you trade derivatives, you need to pledge collateral. And in the world of collateral, usually you would have what you call initial margin, which is the initial amount that you post when you put the trade. And then there would be what you call variation margin. So as the asset moves in value from the point you put the trade, you would either receive variation margin if the trade went in your way or you would give additional variation margin in case the trade goes away from you. And a lot of times in traditional markets, and I think eventually will probably happen in Hyperliquid, you should be able to post the underlying asset as your initial collateral because it's actually perfectly correlated with the derivative. So imagine if you bought a perp on Bitcoin, a good collateral would be Bitcoin, or if you did ETH perp it would be ETH. And if you did silver, it would be silver. The problem is that today there's no good mechanism to deliver these assets with the quality that you would expect. So now imagine if there were perps on US treasuries, you could actually deliver the underlying US treasuries as collateral against your perp trading on US treasuries. And that's why actually having the underlying in tokenized form is a very good use case and opportunity to make derivatives markets more efficient.
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Right. So then that is what, so just going to bring this back to Canton. So when it comes to the stuff like everything that the DTCC houses, that's what you guys are doing is essentially relaying it directly back to the asset. I guess maybe not as the collateral because it's not necessarily all loans, but that is the kind of the advantage of what Canton does is that the assets are more or less legit in terms of not being some other form. It's directly tied to what the asset is. Right. Okay. Um, okay, that's helpful. That's, I'm learning a lot here. So this is very helpful. Um, there is one thing actually I wanted to ask you as well. What's the adoption look like on this, Yuval? What is like the speed? Because it does feel like at this point in time, especially the last couple weeks, the last couple months as crypto chops, it does feel like we're really full steam ahead in terms of finance coming on chain, right? And you guys are right at the forefront of it. We see in the headlines all the time. What does that actually look like in a year or two, right? Because right now, if we go and we look at the RWA, what's actually on chain? You got there's Broadridge that's on Canton with like 100 billion, 200 billion, 300 billion assets. Clearly JP Morgan, DTCC is something that's going to come down the pipeline. If I look back in a couple years, are we looking 10 trillion assets on Canton? Are there 10 trillion assets on ETH? Like what does that look like for you in the next couple years?
I'm not going to speak for ETH even though I have a lot of respect for it. I'll talk to what we are working on and what we can not necessarily control but have more influence. So I think that a lot of times people also think that Canton came out of nowhere. It was a deliberate strategy talking less, doing more, and then when the time is right to actually kind of lift the curtain. I think that again this industry has done more talking than doing. It's not to overcast the doing because there have been a lot of doing, but I would say that the amount of talking has been even greater. And at the end of the day, I always think of humans as we are relative creatures. We always measure the value of something relative to our expectations. So something could be actually quite impressive, but if I talked about it as if it's going to be 100x more impressive than what was actually delivered, you're like, uh, it's actually not that great. And I think that as a result of that, we started the company 11 years ago. We've been building quietly. Canton was launched as a fair launch two years ago, but we knew what was in the pipeline. We knew all of those relationships, all of these applications that we were building. And we waited for a point in time where we thought there's enough gravitational force here that we don't need to now come out and say, 'Hey, let me talk.' Like I didn't want to have a podcast like this two years ago where I say, 'LG, I'm telling you, we've built the best thing in the world and it's going to do XYZ' and I have nothing to stand on. It's purely future tense. I much rather be able to talk about things in present tense or even past tense and to say you don't have to trust my word for it. Just go and talk to all of the people that are participating. So that's first of all, it's not that Canton came out of nowhere. It's been deliberately taken to market in a way that it's better in our opinion to talk about things that are being done or have been done rather than again making promises to the future. So that's just one anecdotal point.
Where are we in a few years? I actually think that $10 trillion is too small of a number. And I'm not going to make necessarily a prediction but try to explain to people. We do like now, Broadridge, who deserve all the credit, do anywhere between three to 400, even over 400 billion dollars of repo every day. And in the crypto ecosystem that seems like a very large number, right? To you it also sounds I assume like a large number. It's a tiny number. It's a tiny number. It's, I wouldn't say it's negligible, but it's tiny in the sense that on a daily volume perspective, repo trades about $10.5 trillion every single day volume. So, we don't even do 5% of it yet, right? So I think that what we're trying to reorient the crypto community to understand that billions is not the right measurement. The DTCC processes quadrillions a year. 10 trillion I think is just not enough. So I think we're going to see much higher numbers than that.
