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Yuval Rooz
CEO & Co-Founder, Digital Asset

Why Wall Street Is Moving Onchain (And Why Canton Is Different) | Yuval Rooz

🎥 Jun 19, 2026 📺 Coin Bureau Podcast ⏱ 54m 👁 1135 views
Yuval Rooz, co-founder and CEO of Digital Asset, explains why some of Wall Street’s biggest institutions are building on Canton Network and why he believes most “tokenized” assets are not truly onchain. From privacy and issuer sovereignty to real-time collateral, tokenized deposits and 24/7 money markets, Yuval breaks down the infrastructure needed to move capital markets onchain for real. We also dig into Canton’s governance model, its lack of a pre-mine or VC token allocations, the role of its native token, and whether institutional crypto adoption is finally becoming more than just a mark...
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About Yuval Rooz

Yuval Rooz, CEO and co-founder of Digital Asset, has been discussing the Canton Network's approach to institutional blockchain adoption, tokenomics, and the network's CC token burn mechanism. In recent appearances, Rooz argued that many existing crypto tokenomics models are designed around speculation rather than fundamental economic value, stating that "most chain tokenomics have been designed that the entire value of the coin comes from pure speculation." He contrasted this with Canton's model, which he described as a "decentralized company" where network usage generates revenue that is used to buy back and burn CC tokens. Rooz also noted that approximately 9% of CC's total supply has been burned, which he said is higher than the burn rates he cited for Ethereum and Solana. Rooz also addressed the technical and economic challenges of extending the CC burn mechanism to private subnets on Canton. He explained that while the team is researching multiple burn models for private subnets, implementing such changes is not trivial, as charging private subnet transactions at the same rate as the global synchronizer could make certain use cases uneconomical. He gave the example of a life insurance policy requiring frequent ledger updates but only generating revenue from annual premiums. Rooz emphasized that the company is "extremely paranoid" about making changes and wants to ensure that the incentive structure encourages users to put as much activity on the ledger as possible. He also stated that Digital Asset remains a private company with no current public investment vehicle for retail investors.

Source: AI-verified profile updated from Yuval Rooz's recent appearances. Browse all interviews →

Transcript (38 segments)
✨ AI-enhanced transcript with speaker attribution
A
Aaron0:01
My guest today runs one of the few crypto companies that Wall Street actually uses. Not in a pilot deck, but in production. Yuval Rooz is the co-founder and CEO of Digital Asset, the company behind Canton Network, a layer one that names like Goldman Sachs, HSBC, DTCC, and JP Morgan have all touched in one form or another. They just raised 355 million led by A16Z Crypto in a market where a lot of people say the institutional adoption story is mostly hype. So today I want to get past the press releases: what is genuinely happening on chain in regulated finance, what's just a new distribution channel wearing a blockchain costume, and whether the thing that makes Canton different is a real moat or a nice slide. Yuval, welcome.
Y
Yuval Rooz0:55
It's great to be here, Aaron.
A
Aaron0:57
Yeah. So before we started, you helped jog my memory for a second there. You're actually in Korea right now, which means that you're one of the few people on this podcast that is actually in the same time zone as me.
Y
Yuval Rooz1:10
Yeah, yeah, happens to be for another 24 hours.
A
Aaron1:16
That's cool. Tell me just real quick what you're doing right now in Korea, what's going on, what's brought you there.
Y
Yuval Rooz1:22
So I'm here to speak at the Global Digital Asset Summit, which is a conference taking place today here. But it was also an opportunity to come meet with some of the financial institutions here. Part of the round we announced that Hanwha, which is a Korean conglomerate, is an investor, but we might have other Korean investors join the round. So here to meet them and talk about some of the regulation that is relevant to Korea.
A
Aaron1:59
Cool. That sounds great. Well, let's get to it because I know you got a tight schedule. So my first question is cutting right to the quick. For someone who already understands Ethereum and Solana, can you describe Canton in one breath? Like what category is it in and what is it deliberately not trying to be?
Y
Yuval Rooz2:20
Well, it's not trying to be Ethereum or Solana. You know, I think for us, we always had conviction. I've been in crypto since 2012, 2013. Our thesis was always that at the tail end, institutional adoption is going to be really the strongest moat of actually taking advantage of this technology. And therefore, when we started building Canton, our question was, well, what are going to be some of the features that are needed in order to get institutional adoption. So of course, one of the hottest topics today is privacy. We were the first ones, I would say, that already 10 years ago said that without privacy, we won't get institutional adoption. You know, a lot of times people in crypto say that it's immutable. Well, it is only immutable as long as the validators agree that it's immutable. And we've seen multiple forks in public chains. We've seen Arbitrum reverse stolen funds. So crypto is not really immutable. Also giving features to asset issuers to have full sovereignty and control over their assets without having third parties being able to fork it for them is another critical feature. We can talk about the governance of the network being very different than Ethereum and Solana. And I would say also the economic model, the tokenomics of the network is very different than Ethereum and Solana.
A
Aaron3:56
Well, let's dive a little bit deeper into the idea of what sets Canton apart in terms of it being a different type of network. It's actually called, according to you guys, a network of networks rather than just one huge monolithic chain. In practice, what does a transaction crossing two of those networks actually look like? And who runs the infrastructure underneath that transaction?
Y
Yuval Rooz4:23
Yeah. So the reason for the name Canton is from the Swiss federal system, right? In Switzerland, you have all these different cantons. Every canton has its own language, it spells Canton differently across different cantons, different tax rates, different rules. The thesis when we were building it was that the world is not homogeneous. Different use cases have different requirements. Different jurisdictions have different laws. And therefore having this monolithic ledger that has the same behavior across means that if you want to comply with your local regulation, you will have to do a lot of things off ledger. And in our view, the whole goal of this technology is to do everything on the ledger. And therefore the name Canton was that you can create effectively a network of networks where every canton has its own permissioning, its own configuration, its own privacy rules, the assets that run on it can do different things. And as a result of that, you also get the benefit of horizontally scaling the network. You don't have just one ledger which has effectively one centralized sequencer that is going to become the bottleneck of the performance of the network. So that's conceptually the idea of Canton. The way a transaction happens is imagine you could have a Canton for payments. Let's just say you issue stablecoins on that Canton. And then you will have another Canton where you could issue US equities. When you want to do a DVP transaction, meaning I want to move equities from one account to another against a payment, meaning the payment will at the same time move from one account to another, you have effectively a public infrastructure, which is what we call the global synchronizer, that is effectively coordinating those transactions across the different Cantons. So you can do one single transaction that will facilitate movements on multiple Cantons, all atomically together.
A
Aaron6:47
Okay. So for starters, it's not Canton as an American would say it, it's Canton.
Y
Yuval Rooz6:53
Canton. Message received.
A
Aaron6:57
Okay, that's really interesting though. And I want to go a little bit deeper into the sovereignty area of Canton. And I'm going to have to fix it every time I think Canton, I have to say Canton, so please forgive me.
Y
Yuval Rooz7:10
All good. All good.
A
Aaron7:14
So Canton frames issuer sovereignty as its core differentiator from other networks and other protocols. Can you just define what that is? And what can an asset issuer do on Canton that they fundamentally can't do on Ethereum or any other app chain?
Y
Yuval Rooz7:35
Sure. So I'm just going to take a very simple example. I gave the example of Arbitrum, and this is not me trying to pick on Arbitrum but it's just a very recent example where the world discovered that Arbitrum has a security council and nine out of 12 people can effectively make changes to the ledger with their own decision. Now if you think about, again, we are very much focusing on institutional use cases, so let's take an institutional use case. Imagine you have a clearing house and the clearing house has collateral in it that you pledged into the clearing. Theoretically speaking, and it's not theoretically, it's practically speaking because it actually happened, that security council can move collateral out of your clearing house without you having any say in it. And I know that everybody will say but they will never do that. And that is potentially true, but the fact that it is possible for that to happen is something that a clearing house would never get comfortable with. There's this thing called perfection of a security, meaning if I perfected a security, and this is a legal term that is very relevant to collateral management, the security is perfected, it means that I have full sovereignty and control over that security. But if there is a bunch of third parties which I have no legal relationship with, they have no liability, nobody can sue the security council for what they've done because they have no responsibility, no legal contract, no relationship, then I can't perfect a security like that. And that means that I will have to maintain another record of the collateral in the clearing house. Therefore I cannot really deem the asset that exists on the chain as the official books and records of my asset. And that is true to every permissionless chain. A 51% attack effectively means they can forge the ledger, they can change the ledger. And again, although statistically it is not likely to happen, it did actually happen. Now, I think that the reason that that is possible on all of these chains is because the architecture of these chains is that both the coordination of transaction and the storage of the transaction happens at the same actor, the validators. In Canton, we actually made that separation, meaning the global sync that I was telling you about, which is coordinating transaction, is run by a group called the super validators. So in our case, and this is going to be confusing, so I'll be very slow. Our super validators are the equivalent of the validators on Ethereum. But we also have validators. So we have effectively broken the relationship between coordinating a transaction to actually validating the data of the transaction. So the global sync is completely blind to what they are processing. They're like ISPs on the internet. They're just routing messages across the different Cantons. And therefore, if you 51% attack them, there's nothing to attack because they don't actually store the data of the transaction. The data of the transaction actually sits on the node of the customer. And therefore, by doing that, you cannot actually, the super validators, even if they were to get hacked, even if they were to be coordinated, cannot change the data on your ledger because they don't even know what is on your ledger. And as a result of that, you have 100% certainty that no one else can actually change your books and records, even with a 50% attack. That just cannot happen on Canton. And again, when you start thinking about some of the use cases, when you think about collateral management, securities financing, all that boring stuff that TradFi does but does in the quadrillions of dollars, those boring details become critical. And that's why sometimes I say, when you see TradFi participate in crypto rails today, they don't actually run a business on those rails. They purely use the wallets as distribution, meaning the books and records all exist off chain. They don't really exist natively on the ledger. Even with stablecoins. If you think about a stablecoin, the books and records of a stablecoin is not the chain. It's what exists at Bank of New York Mellon or at Cantor or whoever is managing the underlying inventory of those stablecoins. It is not the chains that they are on.
A
Aaron12:53
Okay. That's everything that you said totally made sense because before when I was doing my research, it seems more like Canton is more focused towards, like you said, the boring TradFi stuff. But thinking about cryptocurrency as what it was, I believe, originally intended to be, which is sovereign, you don't have a middleman, you don't have to have a middleman to do transactions, but the idea of privacy, I feel like it was tacked on later. Bitcoin was never meant to be necessarily private, although the transactions are masked by alphanumeric addresses, but what you guys are doing is very clever in terms of creating a product that is applicable to a massive amount of money in TradFi. So, in regards to that, with your pushes to get adoption from TradFi, what do you feel like is the end goal for Canton in terms of your ideal partners? And what would that do for the crypto space in general? Because right now, things are pretty dry. Things are pretty red and rough, right?
Y
Yuval Rooz14:08
I don't know. Canton is up about 100%.
A
Aaron14:12
Your guys' coin is actually incredibly just solid. I don't know what you guys are doing to that thing, but well done.
Y
Yuval Rooz14:19
We're not doing anything. You know, there are buyers and sellers and I guess it's evenly distributed. You know, compared to how the market is performing, I think we're up on a relative basis like 50% compared to the rest of crypto in the last few months. I want to touch on your earlier point before I answer your question. I think you have a valid point when it comes to sovereignty when it comes to Bitcoin. Right? I mean, Bitcoin is and still is a sovereign asset, it doesn't have any middleman and all that stuff. The problem is that when Ethereum showed up and said, well, we're going to have like Bitcoin but with programmability, that's totally fine. If Ethereum stayed with smart contracts where the only asset that exists on Ethereum is Ethereum, I would actually say, here you go, you actually have a financial system, you have like a network of digital gold where you can build products and programmability around digital gold. The problem is that market is just too small and not interesting and that's where we entered the world of RWAs. And the second you start saying, well, I'm going to introduce a real world asset, the whole thing just goes out of the window because you have an intermediary. We can try to spin it as much as we want and a stablecoin is a centralized asset. The issuers that are very popular can freeze these assets. You are buying effectively a claim against those centralized issuers that one day when you go to redeem it, guess what? They might say to you, you're not getting the money. Now, that would be very bad for their brand if they did that, but we've seen till today that they've frozen a ton of assets. So already, even if you put away the lack of love maybe to Wall Street or something like that, even with stablecoins, you are trusting an intermediary to run these things. When you think about oracles, what are oracles? It's a centralized entity that is bringing you data on chain and you're trusting it. So the second you move away from this really pure view of Bitcoin or just Ethereum and smart contracts on just Ethereum, you're entering the world of intermediaries. Whether you like it or not, it's just a fact, and I know a lot of people like to argue with me about it, but I just think that the sun is coming up in the morning and it goes down at night and it's just kind of hard to argue about that. And therefore, we actually think that that is a much bigger opportunity. When I entered crypto, one of the things that I really liked about it, because I had the vision that we can create a new financial rail, what I actually liked about it is that what crypto actually offers is for the individual to actually be a part owner of what is going to become tomorrow's financial infrastructure, which was one of the biggest complaints that I had with the world, that the random individual globally couldn't have been a shareholder of Visa or MasterCard when they were formed. Couldn't be a shareholder of SWIFT when it was formed. Couldn't be a shareholder of DTCC when it was formed. And now you actually have that opportunity, but it's not because we were trying to disintermediate the banks. I would actually venture to say that in many cases some of the intermediaries that were created in crypto are significantly worse than the intermediaries that they were claiming to replace. So when we created this, one of the things that we were excited about is how do you actually move capital markets to run natively on chain? And you know, the numbers that we're talking about are things that crypto can't even comprehend in terms of scale. But the average individual has the opportunity to be a shareholder in this new financial infrastructure that is being formed. And by the way, also have products and services later on that are being offered to them that are significantly better than they are today. And I'm happy to kind of get into those things.
A
Aaron18:58
Okay. One of the things that initially drew me to cryptocurrency was the prospect of what Bitcoin represented and what its real purpose was. And I would say democratizing money, making money accessible to anyone, no matter where you are in the world, especially for people that have really weak currencies. And then the idea that you're sharing with me today and all of us. And by the way, if you guys like this video and you like where things are going and you want more interviews like this on the podcast channel, like the video, comment, subscribe, all that good stuff. But just let me make sure to throw that out there before I forget, and it's like at the end, I hate when that happens. But going back to what I was saying, I think a lot of people's first entry token is Bitcoin, or at least for me it was. And you're right, as the longer that I'm in crypto, I see a lot of people trying to reproduce what Bitcoin originally stood for, but tacking on a bunch of stuff, but losing the plot a little bit. And in that same way, there are some other novel breakthroughs in terms of privacy, which feels like one of the main things that crypto really stood for in a way at the beginning. Yet, again, so many people have lost the plot. But what's to stop Ethereum, Solana, some other layer two from shipping something similar, an issuer controlled asset tooling maybe this year or next year and erasing your advantage? Like what puts you guys so far in the lead or creates such a strong moat around what Canton does compared to what someone else on an established network could just implement?
Y
Yuval Rooz20:48
Yeah, it's a great question. So my view, and I'm seeing it playing out today, is that the architecture of those networks wasn't designed to have privacy. So if you think about it, inherently speaking, the fundamental design of those networks is that data gets replicated to all nodes that are not your node. That's just how they work, the validators also sit on the data. And therefore their only mechanism, their only solution for privacy is how do we make the data unavailable to everyone? Meaning, we'll just encrypt or obfuscate the data to everyone. Because right now, the data gets replicated everywhere. And I will tell you that just generally speaking, there are many regulations in different jurisdictions that just doesn't fly. I'll give you an example. In Switzerland, there's this thing called data domicile law, which says financial data, whether encrypted or not, is not allowed to leave Switzerland in physical form. Doesn't matter. Encrypted, unencrypted, not allowed to leave Switzerland. And therefore, that's it. You can't comply with it if you are by definition replicating all the data. In the US, there are healthcare laws, HIPAA compliance, that says whether you encrypt the data or not, you're not allowed to send someone's medical data outside of their own jurisdiction. You have to hold it and that person can hold it. If you ship it encrypted or not to someone else, you have violated their HIPAA rules. So you're already by design, by replicating data to a bunch of third parties that are not the owners of the data, exposing yourself to violations of all kinds of rules in the world. And second of all, the idea today, the only solution for it is what everybody's hoping is zero knowledge proofs. And the problem with zero knowledge, and I have a lot of admiration for this technology. I get attacked a lot of times for saying things about zero knowledge. Again, my co-founder was one of the researchers that worked on zero knowledge and there's no disrespect and you will see zero knowledge being used in Canton but for different reasons. Is that if you go and ask any regulated entity today, would you be comfortable, let's just say a fund, any fund, a venture fund, a PE fund, any fund, you would ask them, hey, would you be comfortable onboarding a client where to see the name of the client, the address of the client, you don't get to know anything about the client, but a zero knowledge tells you that the client is KYC'd, AML'd and is fine to be onboarded. You will see that the answer across the board is going to be no. And the reason for that is because if for whatever reason there was a bug or some kind of a mistake, the person who's going to be liable for that is the fund. You're not going to be able to go to your regulator and say, but the zero knowledge told me that it's fine. Or if you're back to our previous example, a clearinghouse, and you're accepting collateral but you don't get to see the collateral. You're just accepting that the zero knowledge is telling you that it's there. But then in a moment of distress when you need to call on the collateral, you figure out that there was this Orchard bug like what just happened with Zcash a week ago or two weeks ago, and you realize that someone was able just to mint collateral out of thin air and you didn't know about it. What are you going to say to the members of the clearinghouse or to your regulator? The ZK told us that the collateral is there. And once you start getting into these, again, boring nuances, you understand that that is just not going to fly with regulated institutions, not anytime soon. So a lot of times what people say is, well, Canton is so boring. It's not using all of these really cool things in crypto, and I would say yeah, we're very boring and pragmatic. Because again, we're trying to solve problems that can create utility today. And we're not trying to be adventurous with the type of organizations that we work with.
A
Aaron25:18
Great answer. I mean, I agree with you too. Zero knowledge proof, zero knowledge in general, it's great when you kind of write it down and you think about it, you talk about it over a beer with your friends, but when you actually have real institutional money at the table, they'll be like, what? You kidding me? And especially with what happened with Zcash and so many other protocols that get hacked or phished or whatever. There has to be some sort of guardrails in place. I want to actually pivot to essentially like real-world assets in a way. Real capital markets. You've taken some pretty extreme, as you've already mentioned, contrarian stances, which I like. And you've argued before that putting an asset on chain isn't technically real adoption. It could just be a fancier distribution channel. So could you just walk me through the difference between tokenization theater and genuine capital markets activity on chain?
Y
Yuval Rooz26:24
Sure. So again, back to the example about collateral. If you are a real player and you're going to take collateral, you want to make sure that the token is legally binding the asset. It's legally equal to the asset. And it's not a claim against something legally binding which is the asset. And I would say that most tokenization projects today are IOU tokens. They're not the actual asset. What you see on chain is a claim against a ledger that exists off chain. And therefore, because you don't actually have visibility, you don't have certainty. The whole issue in capital markets today is, how do I know that your ledger is doing what it's doing? And therefore, people have to reconcile all the time to one another. Because when I'm going to come and say I received the money from you on a future date based on some transaction, if you send me the wrong amount of money, I say, well, but you owed me like a hundred dollars. And you're like, no, I owed you ninety. And then you're like, no, okay, let's go through history and now recreate why I think you owe me a hundred and you think you owe me ninety. And one of us will prove to be wrong. And we'll say, cool, here's the delta between what I thought I owed you and what I owed you. And that was kind of the whole premise of blockchain is we need to eradicate that. So the reason why I say Ethereum works only on Ethereum is because Ethereum is the books and records for Ethereum. When I send ETH into Aave, I have perfected the security. There is no other ETH off chain that is the true books and records of ETH. You know that the second that token was pledged into Aave, that's it. That is a perfected security. When you have the real books and records off chain, well, if you pledge the on chain tokenized asset, how do you have certainty that the asset off chain really exists? You just need to trust the counterparty. So inherently, all of these tokenization projects, what they have done is they introduce additional counterparty risk, where you are effectively taking a risk on whoever is the tokenizer to be representing all of their claims on chain correctly. But, we have that already today in capital markets. That's how capital markets work today. So when we were creating Canton, for us, the ultimate goal of tokenization is that the ledger is the official books and records of an asset. There is no off-chain asset. Now, without privacy, you cannot have that. Nobody would actually, and without asset control and all of the things that we talked about earlier, nobody would get comfortable actually issuing assets where the official books and records is the ledger, meaning those assets look and behave like ETH. There is no additional books and records of that asset anywhere else. And that's why when we were thinking about the features, you had to be really contrarian to what exists out there in order to get to what we think is the real value of blockchain, which is real-world assets having the certainty and the efficiency of Ethereum. Think about how many cases in the RWA world people then discovered that whoever would tokenize whatever didn't have what they claimed to have. I can think of a few cases that I don't want to name, but there were multiple cases. And that's the inherent risk. There were stablecoins that depegged because they didn't manage their cash off chain correctly. So these things do happen. Now, if your assets are natively on chain, this is the asset and there is no kind of another copy of that asset. And that's really to me the real definition of tokenization.
A
Aaron30:46
Okay. Well, we talk about so much, there's so many other questions that I want to ask you on my list today. I don't think we're going to get to all of it. But that explanation does help to clarify RWA. And it also helps me to reconsider my idea of what real-world assets on chain should be and what they aren't. I want to go back. It's similar in terms of the question, but I want to go back as well to the whole how Canton is serving the larger institutional investors, banks, all those big names, big money. Now, when you're working with big money on a traditional system and being in crypto, being a lot more agile, a lot more responsive, much more flexible compared to the older systems, what's something running on Canton today that basically could not be done in the traditional system at all. Not like doing something faster or cheaper, but what's actually impossible, what's technically impossible for TradFi to accomplish that Canton just absolutely knocks it out of the park?
Y
Yuval Rooz32:08
Yeah, sure. Listen, I think faster and cheaper in many cases is not possible in current legacy systems. So I would say that in many cases that is the capability. But let me give you an example of something that we're hoping to announce in the next couple of months. If you are today a global organization that is managing tens, if not hundreds of billions of dollars globally and you are receiving money and you are sending money, you have to move money between your different legal entities and that's just happening on a regular basis. Today, what you would do is you would have like a system that is called a treasury management system and it is trying to predict based on certain things that are known, certain things that are unknown, where would you need money at any given point of time in the world and it tries to make sure that you have that money to fulfill all of your obligations. And because money doesn't move very fluidly, it has to generally speaking have some cash buffers in all of these different jurisdictions. So in case suddenly you needed more money than you were expecting, there's always this buffer. And these systems also try, based on the prediction of when you would need the money in the jurisdiction, also convert some of these assets into yield products. But because moving from money to let's say a money market fund will take you T+1 or T+2, you have to effectively sit on piles of cash that is really earning you nothing. And a term that companies will use is operating cash flow. How much cash flow do you have to fulfill your operations at any given point of time? So if you're like a global company and you sit on a billion dollars of cash flow, you have now a billion dollars that is just sitting in a bank account idle, just waiting to be used, in all kinds of jurisdictions. Now, one of the things that we're going to show is that because we have a partner with Tradeweb, which is an exchange for credit products, you'll be able to effectively move from a tokenized deposit into a money market fund real-time 24/7. Can't do that today. That means that if you are sitting on a billion dollars of cash, you as a company can now generate, let's say, anywhere between thirty to thirty-five million dollars of additional revenue without any change to your business. It's just because you could actually drive utility out of your billion dollars of cash, which today you can't because you have to fulfill your obligation. If it's ten billion dollars of cash, it's three hundred fifty million dollars of additional revenue. And you see where it goes. This is again not doing anything different with your business. This is just because you could actually squeeze more utility out of your assets. That's just one example. We just announced recently with SocGen, Societe Generale, that they're going to start doing prime brokerage. When you start thinking about all of the places where you as a financial institution have to pledge collateral, it's going to get a bit into the numbers, but when you think about when you calculate how much collateral, how much margin you have to deliver, generally what is associated is what is the size of your portfolio, how volatile that portfolio is, but another huge component is when is going to be the next time you could actually give me either additional collateral or you will receive collateral back. Now, hopefully, intuitively, it makes sense to you that the longer the time period between those two points in time are, the bigger your margin has to be because you have time delta between those things that bad things can happen. And generally speaking, that variation grows in a square root of X, like a logarithmic scale. So if you can actually start compressing the time between the periods where you could actually deliver collateral or receive collateral, what you expect is the amount of margin you would have to pledge goes down dramatically. And what that means is if you are a trading firm or a buy-side firm that uses clearinghouses or prime brokers, you expect that the amount of balance sheet you would have to deploy in order to fund your trading activity will go down. I will just now give you the conclusion just so you understand how big it is. We did an analysis with some of the most sophisticated firms in the space, and they think that if most of their counterparties allowed them to do more real-time margining on Canton, they see a world where they can see an uplift in their balance sheet efficiency of forty to sixty percent. That means that if I'm a firm, if I'm a trading firm, and I made a billion dollars of revenue this year, with the same balance sheet, I can do anywhere between one point four to one point six billion dollars of revenue without having to get any additional loans or credit lines or things like that. And that is a game-changer. That is a massive uplift. Those are just two examples. I can keep on going. But I think that one of the things maybe as a result of this question, I think that the problem in crypto, they just kept on talking at a high level, financial freedom. I think what we have tried to do differently is, as you could see, first of all, by taking a very contrarian view of the ledger, but it's also taking very specific use cases that first of all, we know would have massive flows behind them, but also that if you actually deliver them, then that outcome to a customer is going to be quite sizable, and therefore, adoption would be worth it. Because a lot of times, you could actually come up with a use case that is net positive. But when you then start stacking AI, interest rate, geopolitical, dot dot dot, you're like, yeah, go to the back of the queue. I get it. It's positive. It's not negative, but it's not interesting enough to invest in a transformation. So actually really taking a step back and thinking about, well, how can this be a differentiator to the level that it's life-altering? Forty to sixty percent uplift in your balance sheet efficiency is a game-changer. And that is worth investing in.
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Aaron38:57
So I just want to play devil's advocate just a little bit. You've been in crypto, you said, since 2012 or 2013? I've been in since 2017. So that means we're both, we have plenty of battle scars that people have no idea the horrors that we've seen over our lives in crypto. And namely, I'm thinking 2022, where we had mass contagion with Celsius, Three Arrows Capital, BlockFi, which I understand it's a different model than what you guys do at Canton and what you're expressing, but in a way it's also similar, where I'm taking my money and I'm trusting it to Celsius or to BlockFi to earn a yield on it as a retail investor. Not the same as what you're talking about, talking about the big big big money, but still I didn't recognize and realize the risk, nor did I understand the risk when I started to get into DeFi of impermanent loss and all of the volatility and when the market's going to fluctuate, it's really going to destroy all of my liquidity pairs. Hence, that amazing yield that I'm getting is basically just a band-aid that is on top of a severed head, right? It's terrible. So what have you guys done in terms of guardrails with this, with what you've just shared with me in terms of providing this regular and fairly safe yield, but what kind of guardrails are there just in case we have another contagion? God forbid, I do not want to see that happen again. 2022 was brutal.
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Yuval Rooz40:33
It's a great question. It's a super great question because I think that Delta and what we're doing is we're not trying to reinvent finance from the ground up. And I think that a lot of things that happened in DeFi is people that effectively marketed these DeFi protocols as, look, it's just Wall Street never giving you the opportunity to invest in these yields. And that was just, in my opinion, a lie. They've effectively just, like a lot of times in crypto, people create new terms to effectively, in my opinion, obfuscate what they're really doing. Like, why do we have to create the term looping when looping is just leverage? You're literally taking a loan against your asset and reinvesting in the asset. You're just leveraging the asset. This is not a new concept. So what people did is they took made-up assets that had no connection to reality, and then they just put massive amount of leverage into assets that are very volatile. Guess what? Also in real-world markets, when there's tons of leverage, there's deleveraging. And when deleveraging happens, it ain't pretty. So I think that maybe the Delta in what we're doing is I'm not trying to take the repo market, which is about thirteen trillion of notional a day, and turn it into fifty. That's not what I'm trying to do. I'm just trying to take that thirteen trillion and run it on Canton. I'm not trying to create this massive new leverage in the system because the customers that we are working with are not trying to make up new yields that don't exist today. What they're actually saying, if I can actually squeeze half a basis point out of a thirteen trillion market, amazing. You could do the calculation later on of what is half a basis point out of thirteen trillion, and it's a big number. So we're not trying to say like, oh, how do I now squeeze twenty percent out of that number? It's trying to look for these efficiencies. So we're not trying to recreate finance from the ground up. We're just saying there is a better way to run finance as it is today, and the numbers are ginormous if you do it. You don't actually have to do those things, and that's I think the biggest difference in what we're doing than what the rest of crypto has done.
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Aaron43:04
Okay, thanks. So I want to save the best for last because I'm a trader, investor. I watch charts. I literally look at your chart every single, well, I look at it six days a week because I have it in my list of like two hundred coins that I look at in crypto, and then TradFi is a whole other list. So I do pay attention to price action. I do pay attention to all that stuff, but I am admittedly very weak in terms of fundamentals. I'm always paying attention to what the chart's doing because to me, the chart always expresses supply and demand. It expresses the desire and the intent and the expectations of the investors. But I also am curious to hear a little bit more about the fundamental side of the Canton coin. Specifically, your guys' FAQ says that you guys don't have a pre-mine, and you don't have any VC allocations. So coins are earned through utility like running validators or apps or I assume just trading as well. So with a three hundred fifty-five million raise behind the company, how do you square no insider allocation with investors who clearly expect a return?
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Yuval Rooz44:13
Sure. We as a company made a decision, and I know I'm going to say some things, and whether you believe me or not is fine, whether the listeners believe it is fine. So me as the founder of the company, the creator of Canton, never received an allocation to my name. My entire exposure to Canton Network is my equity in Digital Asset. And there's multiple reasons for that. I think one of them is I think we've seen multiple founders that launched a new coin, became rich, realized how hard it is, and got bored. They have so much money. And I want to say that I'm different but I wanted to hedge myself to never put myself in that position where I have that incentive, even that option available to me. So whatever I have to my name had to come out of my own pocket, and I had to buy it on the open market. So we as founders did not give an allocation. We do not compensate our employees with coins. We just don't do those things. And that also translated to our investors. If you're an investor in Digital Asset, we don't do token warrants on top of equity investments. So all of our rounds to date were purely equity rounds. Now, did we do OTC transactions and sell on top of an equity invested at market kind of deals or locked tokens to VCs or to investors? Yes. But, they had to pay for it. We didn't do penny token deals. So that is kind of something that we've done. And therefore, again, it breaks the mold of how crypto has been working and people just don't necessarily buy it and that's just, I think I have enough highly regulated organizations that if they kept on hearing me saying these lies, supposedly, on podcasts they would say like, dude, not cool. We are associated with you and if the truth comes out, this will look badly on us. And therefore, I'm comfortable to say it because it's the truth. So we just decided. All of the investors that you see in the existing round are all equity investors and haven't received any token as part of their investment. And therefore, they're taking purely a bet on the equity value of Digital Asset appreciating. That's the thesis behind their investment. Now, do they go and buy in the open market for their liquid funds? Possible. But I will just tell you as part of the funding round they haven't received any token. And by the way, that is easy to validate because everybody can see our wallet. So they can see if any tokens moved out of our wallet in the last few months.
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Aaron47:23
Okay. I do appreciate that fact that you guys, I mean, that's pretty much par for the course, right? You launch a coin, you have a massive amount that's vested, and then there are these people that are early investors that get a massive amount and then of course when it gets listed, they just instantly dump to cash out right away where if you guys are just saying, well, put your money where your mouth is. If you really believe in it, then you can buy it. I think that sets you guys apart. But one thing that you kept mentioning over and over again, I mean, it says there in your little subline next to your name. Digital Asset is a separate company, correct? So if Digital Asset disappeared tomorrow, and again, God forbid, I'm not saying that I want that to happen, but if it did, does the network keep running then, and who's actually validating Canton?
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Yuval Rooz48:17
Perfect. So today there are fifty super validators running the network. DTCC, Nasdaq, Visa, Digital Asset, SBI, DRW. I mean, I can keep going. Tradeweb, Broadridge. There's a good amount of organizations. But maybe I think it's a really good question, and it's a very important question, because when we launched the network, that to some extent was just as important of a question than the technology features. And let me explain what I mean by that. When you're asking an institutional player to run their business on chain, you're not just asking them to trust that the technology works, you're also asking them to trust the governance of the network. Now, if me as the creator of the network controls the codebase, controls the governance of the network, yeah, maybe today at the entry point of all these organizations everything looks good, but maybe two, three years from now, I now decide, oh, there's a way for me to make money as long as I change all the rules. And therefore, large organizations just would never be comfortable with that. So when we created the network, the whole codebase was open source, but we actually gave the codebase to the foundation. So I as Digital Asset don't control the codebase. More than that, when we created the foundation, I had to go the extra mile to show we are serious about the governance of the network not being controlled by us. So who do you think chairs the foundation of the network? Not us. That's what I can tell you. Not Digital Asset. It's Euroclear and DTCC. Who do you think chairs the technical committee of the network? Not Digital Asset. It's Tradeweb. Who do you think chairs the tokenomics committee? Not Digital Asset. We are one vote out of all these organizations. Now, am I naive to say that Digital Asset as the creators of the technology that still do a lot of the development work towards the protocol don't have a significant influence? Of course we do. 100% we do. And people do come to us and ask for our opinion and we have a significant influence. But if we were to go crazy tomorrow and wanted to do something insane, it's not within our control. And I think that that show of seriousness about we are committed to proper governance is what gets a lot of these organizations comfortable. Again, I go back to that example of the Security Council. It's not that these are bad guys, but if you are a serious organization, you cannot put yourself in that situation. Whether you trust the guys or not, it's not really relevant. And that's why we went the extra mile to say we will create a foundation. We will not chair the foundation. We will not chair any of the committees. And the codebase has to be controlled by the foundation.
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Aaron51:29
Okay. That's interesting. Thanks. So, got last last last last one for you. Just strip away the funding round and the logos. If you had to convince one skeptical crypto veteran, maybe me, in a single sentence why Canton matters and isn't just permissionless and it's not permission finance with the token but what is that one sentence where people can just go like I get it and now I'm all in.
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Yuval Rooz52:02
The only thing I won't satisfy is it's not going to be in one sentence but I will try to make it as concise as possible. I think that what crypto has failed to do today is create models that are anchored in reality of economics. You said supply and demand. When you look at most chains that have MEV and priority fees, when you actually look at the breakdown of the fees, you look at how much tokens have been burned out of the supply, it's actually very low. I think like Ethereum is like three point something percent of the total supply have been burned. I think Solana is under a percent. And then this is not necessarily like a dig but it's just the facts. When you look at Canton, I think now it's close to nine percent of the total supply already have been burned and this is in less than two years of production. And the reason is there are no priority fees. You have to transact on Canton, you have to burn coins. That's it. And I think the reason why Hyperliquid has done so well is because they're saying we're taking the profits and we're removing supply out. So if you believe that profits will continue to grow, well, supply is going to shrink and what should happen to the value of the network? It should go up. So I think what people now in crypto are starting to understand is supply and demand, how much burn happens on the network actually matters. That's actually the fundamental of value. And therefore if you believe that what Canton is capable of doing is bringing institutional flow, meaning those numbers are big, I think that it's very exciting about how the burn is going to happen. Like I said, less than two years, we're already at eight percent of the total float have been burned. What does that mean? So that's why I get excited about it. That's kind of at a high level, but it wasn't a one sentence, so I apologize for that.
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Aaron54:08
Nothing you've answered has been a one sentence, but I'm glad you haven't because that would have been a very boring interview. Yuval, thank you again so much for your time. Can you please just give a quick shout-out for your socials, where people can follow you, websites to check, all that good stuff?
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Yuval Rooz54:27
Yeah, I'm Yuval Rooz on X. I think I have a LinkedIn that I sometimes update, but probably better to follow me on X. Digital Asset is digitalasset.com. And canton.network is the website for the foundation.
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Aaron54:44
Fantastic. Thank you again for your time and have a great time in Korea as well.
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Yuval Rooz54:48
Awesome. Thanks a lot, Aaron.