Digital Asset co-founder and CEO Yuval Rooz says the crypto industry should use the current U.S. policy window to embed blockchain deeply enough into financial infrastructure that future political shifts become harder to unwind. Speaking at TOKEN2049 in Singapore, Rooz argued that adoption, rather than regulation alone, is the strongest defense against future policy reversals, saying the industry should reach a point by 2028 where “there is no going back.”
The argument comes after Digital Asset raised substantial capital to expand Canton Network. According to Digital Asset’s official funding disclosures, the company raised $135 million in June 2025 and another $355 million in June 2026, with the latter led by a16z crypto and backed by institutions including BNP Paribas, Broadridge, Citadel Securities, HSBC, S&P Global and Tradeweb. The June 2026 financing was equity funding rather than a Canton Coin allocation.
Canton Targets Financial Infrastructure, Not Just Tokenization
Rooz’s strategy centers on moving institutional workflows onchain rather than treating token issuance itself as evidence of adoption. Canton already supports applications spanning repo, collateral mobility, tokenized securities and payments, while Digital Asset says the network was designed specifically around the privacy and interoperability requirements of regulated markets. The economic objective is to make blockchain part of recurring financial operations instead of an optional layer institutions can easily abandon.
That thesis has attracted capital well beyond crypto-native investors. Digital Asset’s earlier financing trajectory was already evident when the company was seeking additional funding as Canton attracted institutional backing, while payment networks are separately integrating the chain into traditional infrastructure. Mastercard, for example, has included Canton among the networks supporting its expanded stablecoin settlement options for financial partners. Those integrations provide stronger evidence of institutionalization than tokenized-asset issuance totals alone.
Canton’s privacy model is also more nuanced than simply making an institutional blockchain compliant by default. Its protocol provides sub-transaction privacy, meaning participants receive only the information relevant to them, while individual applications can impose their own permissioning and access rules. KYC, AML and participant restrictions remain functions of the applications and institutions using Canton rather than universal controls enforced identically across the network.
U.S. Policy Still Leaves Room for Reversal
Rooz’s 2028 focus reflects the possibility that administrative priorities could change after the next U.S. presidential election. The concern became more visible after the CLARITY Act failed to advance on September 15, when the Senate rejected cloture on the motion to proceed. Without comprehensive market-structure legislation, parts of the current regulatory direction continue to depend on how agencies use their existing authority.
Not every crypto-related policy remains equally exposed. A prohibition preventing the Federal Reserve from issuing or creating a retail CBDC is already federal law under the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act and runs through December 31, 2030. That CBDC restriction is therefore more durable than an agency policy that a future administration could reverse administratively, although Congress could still change the statute.
The broader institutional trend is developing outside Canton as well. U.S. banking groups have begun building industry-owned blockchain infrastructure for regulated institutions, while institutional data providers are raising capital around tokenized and onchain capital-market infrastructure. Rooz’s argument is ultimately an adoption thesis: the more settlement, collateral, payments and securities workflows depend on blockchain infrastructure, the greater the operational cost of reversing that transition.
Whether Canton itself reaches that threshold remains measurable rather than predetermined. Capital raised by Digital Asset and participation from large financial institutions establish resources and distribution, but durable entrenchment will depend on recurring transaction activity, assets actively used as collateral, settlement volumes and workflows that institutions continue using because they provide economic advantages over legacy infrastructure.
