WalletConnect has added support for Canton Network, a blockchain built for institutional finance. The two companies first revealed the partnership at EthCC in Cannes, during a panel moderated by The Defiant’s senior editor Olivia Capozzalo, before releasing the news publicly today, April 22.
The deal aims to bring Canton’s privacy-focused infrastructure to WalletConnect’s global ecosystem, enabling access to stablecoin payments, tokenized real-world assets, and DeFi applications. According to a press release viewed by The Defiant, the crypto infrastructure firm’s ecosystem supports 700 crypto wallets, 70,000 decentralized applications, and 55.5 million users, all of which can now connect to the protocol, which is within the top-20 chains by market cap, per CoinGecko.
Canton currently boasts over $8 trillion in tokenized assets processed monthly and more than $350 billion in U.S. Treasuries settled daily, per the release.
Data from RWAxyz shows that all of the nearly $330 billion in tokenized RWAs on Canton are represented asset value, meaning they use the blockchain for recordkeeping and operational efficiency, but don’t allow for on-chain distribution.
WalletConnect CEO Jess Houlgrave framed Canton’s privacy model as “a requirement for institutions to work at scale.”
The announcement arrives, however, amid an ongoing debate over Canton’s self-description as a “public, permissionless blockchain” — a characterization many in the industry contest. As The Defiant has reported, critics argue that Canton is closer to a permissioned database than a true blockchain, with validator admission controlled by a governance committee of incumbent institutions.
Canton has been accumulating serious institutional momentum in recent months. JPMorgan’s USD-denominated deposit token is set to be issued natively on Canton in phases throughout 2026, as The Defiant reported, and the DTCC selected Canton to tokenize a subset of U.S. Treasury securities it holds, citing the platform’s privacy features, per The Defiant’s earlier coverage.
The broader race for institutional-grade privacy is heating up on multiple fronts: Boundless, a ZK proving network, recently integrated with the $XRP Ledger to bring native zero-knowledge proof verification to the Layer 1 for the first time, enabling institutions to build financial applications on XRPL that execute privately while maintaining regulatory compliance, as The Defiant reported.
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