Andrew Grant
YZi Labs is now part of a growing alliance of regulated and crypto-native players funding Digital Asset’s Canton Network, a blockchain aiming to merge Wall Street-scale operations with on-chain privacy and composability.
On July 3, YZi Labs, the venture capital and incubation firm formerly known as Binance Labs, announced its participation in Digital Asset’s $135 million Series E round, which attracted Wall Street heavyweights like Goldman Sachs, Citadel Securities, and DTCC.
The investment, following Digital Asset’s initial June 24 funding reveal, positions YZi Labs alongside traditional finance’s most influential institutions in backing the Canton Network, a public Layer 1 blockchain seeking to reconcile institutional compliance with decentralized infrastructure.
The convergence of companies in the multimillion-dollar funding round represents a strategic alignment between crypto’s builders and TradFi’s gatekeepers. Canton’s configurable privacy model has already processed over $1.5 trillion in monthly tokenized U.S. Treasury repo activity, demonstrating that regulated finance is ready to embrace blockchain, but only on certain terms.
The institutional onchain revolution takes shape
YZi Labs’ investment in Digital Asset can be seen as a strategic play to participate in the growth of blockchain infrastructure that finally meets Wall Street’s demands. Traditional finance has long viewed public blockchains with skepticism, wary of exposing sensitive transactions to full transparency, while private chains remain isolated and cumbersome.
Canton Network’s configurable privacy model changes that equation, allowing institutions to control data visibility without sacrificing interoperability. That’s why YZi Labs, alongside Goldman Sachs and Citadel, sees Canton as the missing link for tokenizing real-world assets at scale.
With the $135 million capital injection, the Canton Network plans to accelerate its expansion, focusing on three key areas: infrastructure scalability, faster onboarding for regulated entities, and deeper interoperability between applications.
According to the announcement, the network’s roadmap over the next 12 to 18 months includes new live deployments, global market expansion, and more seamless application-level composability.
“This investment from YZi Labs reinforces the growing demand for blockchain infrastructure that meets the rigorous standards of global financial markets, Yuval Rooz, Co-Founder and CEO of Digital Asset, said. “With this new backing, we’re advancing our mission to bring trillions of dollars more in real-world assets on-chain, creating a more connected and efficient financial ecosystem.”
YZi Labs’ involvement also signals a strategic pivot under its rebrand from Binance Labs. Since Changpeng Zhao stepped back from Binance’s exchange operations, YZi has doubled down on infrastructure bridging crypto and traditional systems.
Its March investment in Plume Network, a modular blockchain for real-world assets, mirrors the Canton playbook: enabling institutions to tokenize everything from carbon credits to private equity.
Similarly, backing AI-data startup Vana and token distribution platform Sign earlier this year reveals a pattern: YZi isn’t chasing speculative DeFi trends but funding rails for mass adoption. The firm claims to manage over $10 billion in assets globally.
