Bitcoin is the first stop for institutions entering crypto. @DigitalAssets' Giselle Lai tells @_dsencil why Bitcoin ETFs are lowering the barrier to entry and why the goal isn't to sell Bitcoin, but help institutions make informed decisions. Why "getting off zero" matters?🔽

Never a dull week in the @CantonNetwork ecosystem... (1) Canton developer @digitalasset raises an additional $10 million extension round, after raising some $355 million at a $2 billion valuation earlier this year. (2) The @CantonFdn Development Fund has now allocated 46.6M $CC across 12 funded teams. (3) The Canton Network itself has now burned a cumulative total of 4.38B $CC per data from @cantonnews_org. (4) Cantor8 announces the Canton ecosystem's biggest IRL hackathon of 2026, taking place in London on August 29. (5) @Cashen_cc establishes itself as the network's leading $CC locking marketplace, with more than 285 million $CC locked across 50+ platforms. (6) Canton-based trading platform @Rocky_exchange partners with @Send, promising to integrate Send’s stablecoin infrastructure into its product.

Almost 12 years ago, I left @DRWTrading with @wesarn_real to start @digitalasset. @ShaulKfir joined us shortly after. The name felt right. The idea was simple but audacious: build a global settlement system that is asset agnostic. One that doesn’t eliminate banks, exchanges, and intermediaries, but tears down the barriers keeping people from accessing assets and settling at a fraction of today’s cost. A new financial world, built for the end consumer. We knew institutional adoption was the path. We just didn’t know how long it would take. We failed. We made bad decisions. There are things we would have done differently. But we never let go of our North Star, even when people around us were convinced we had no idea what we were doing. That focus, conviction, and most of all, patience, led us to launching @CantonNetwork. And the results speak for themselves. Today is a new chapter in that story. I’m proud to announce that @a16zcrypto is leading our latest round, joined by some of the giants of the global financial system, including @ABNAMRO, ADIA, @apolloglobal, @BNPParibasCIB, @Broadridge, @citsecurities, @CMEVentures, @cbventures, Green Wolf Asset Management, @Hanwha_Official, @HSBC, @icapitalnetwork, @LCVentures, @OptiverGlobal, @polychain, @R136Ventures, @SPGlobal, @sbigroup, @smash_capital, @SoFi, @Tradeweb, and @WilliamBlair, and others we’ll be naming shortly. Twelve years ago, I could not have imagined building alongside partners of this caliber. $CC today processes the highest fees of any institutional blockchain network. And we’re just getting started. What’s coming later this year is just as exciting. None of this happens without the builders, the ones who show up to weekly tokenomics meetings, dial into operations subcommittees, spend nights and weekends building apps on Canton, and show up on @X to cheer this ecosystem forward. You are not just supporters. You are partners. I’m honored to be on this journey with you. On a personal note: @a16z hits differently for me. Ben’s book The Hard Thing About Hard Things was one I kept coming back to during the hard stretches. Having his firm lead this round is meaningful in a way that’s hard to put into words. So I’ll let him do it: “The hard thing isn’t setting a big, audacious goal. The hard thing is spending sleepless nights trying to achieve it. The hard thing isn’t dreaming big. The hard thing is waking up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat when the dream turns into a nightmare. Motivating yourself by watching YouTube shorts or Instagram reels isn’t the hard thing. The hard thing is working every day and being consistent even if you feel like shit. The hard thing isn’t boasting you could achieve anything. The hard thing is working like hell to achieve something. The hard thing isn’t believing in yourself. The hard thing is getting things done when nobody believes in you, even when you doubt yourself. The hard thing isn’t telling yourself that you must achieve the impossible. The hard thing is toiling hard every day for years despite knowing that success is too uncertain.”

Meet the Developer Behind Canton Network Itself. You've likely caught the @Bloomberg headline saying that @digitalasset is raising ~$300 million at a $2 billion valuation in a round expected to be led by legendary VC @a16z. But few truly understand DA's incredible history, journey and positioning... What is Digital Asset? DA was founded way back in 2014, just five years after $BTC itself, by experienced founders in @YuvalRooz, @wesarn_real and @ShaulKfir. The company is the driving force behind the Daml smart contract language - a purpose-built language that is key to the features that make @CantonNetwork so appealing to regulated institutions and sectors. Today, DA has representation in New York, London, and Hong Kong (the list goes on) and it remains one of, if not the leader when it comes to institutional-grade DLT and blockchain technology. In the 2026 era, and as Canton matures alongside the @CantonFdn, DA remains a vital bridge between traditional finance and the digital financial future, having partnered with the likes of Goldman Sachs, BNP Paribas, Euroclear, and countless others. At Cantor8, we support DA's fundraising process and look forward to the benefits it can bring to the $CC ecosystem at large...

The institutional risk stack is being rebuilt. Custody, compliance, and reporting now need to work as one operating layer. #BybitInstitutional# #NewFinancialPlatform# #DigitalAssetRisk#

We're working on something big… Cantor8's development team is currently in the process of building a toolkit to allow programs written in the Rust programming language to communicate with @CantonNetwork's Daml ledgers. The smart contracts running on Canton are written in Daml (the language developed by @DigitalAsset) and its official tooling is built around Daml and the JVM. While Daml provides many of the advantages that make Canton so successful, it remains niche for now. Rust, meanwhile, boasts an estimated 5+ million developers worldwide and is used by several major blockchain networks, including @Solana, @StellarOrg, and @NearProtocol. This new toolkit will provide the translation layer for programs written in Rust, handling all the low-level plumbing so developers can work with Daml contracts through Rust tooling that is familiar to them.

🇰🇷 Next stop: Seoul! We’re going big for 2026 DIGITAL ASSET KOREA Bullbit is thrilled to step up as a Premium Sponsor at @DigitalAssetKS, bringing the next generation of decentralized trading, deep liquidity, and high-performance orderbooks to the main stage. ⚡️ Buy ticket and meet us at COEX Auditorium: 🎤 Exclusive Keynote: Catch our 15-minute deep dive into the future of DEX on the main stage. 🎮 Join the Minigame: Drop by, play a quick game, and grab your exclusive rewards! Come find the bull in Seoul 🐂

Bringing a stablecoin to market What should you do if you are issuing a stablecoin today? @wesarn_real, Co-Founder of @digitalasset says: 1. Focus on the backing assets 2. Build them to be natively onchain 3. Create 24/7 velocity creation/redemption mechanism 4. Focus on the stablecoin having the utility of going in and out of these two forms of money 🎙️ Listen to the latest episode on Tokenizedpod[dot]com

Onchain finance is coming. But right now, it’s 24/7 front end, with a 9-3pm back end. @wesarn_real, Co-Founder of @digitalasset, lived through Lehman Brothers going bankrupt on a Sunday afternoon. He thinks that we have a long way to go before capital markets truly come on-chain. His take? “We have this artificial low glass ceiling on the value of stablecoins today. It doesn't have a lot of capital markets applicability, because the backends are not capital markets onchain enabled.“ 🎙️ Listen to the latest episode on Tokenizedpod[dot]com