Networks
Canton: Introduction to The Institutional Chain
Quadrillions in RWA volume are coming onchain.
DTCC, a US financial infrastructure that processed securities transactions valued at $3.7 quadrillion annually in 2024, is coming onchain.
They'll offer a new service that'll allow participants to tokenize DTC-custodied stocks & assets onto pre-approved blockchains. As of now, they've only announced Canton Network as one of the blockchains.
More chains like Ethereum will likely be added over time. But the fact that Canton is already live matters.
Canton is an L1 designed by institutions, for institutions.
It launched in May 2023 as a consortium of more than 30 financial firms. The design choices are very intentional:
- Private. Parties view only transaction components relevant to their role.
- They designed a programming model specifically for financial workflows called Daml smart contracts.
- Canton operates as a "network of networks," where institutions run independent sub-ledgers connected via a Global Synchronizer. They're interoperable as well.
Canton has partnerships with over 600 institutions. That includes names like DTCC and Nasdaq. You can see the full list on their ecosystem page.
The usage numbers are already massive:
- >$6 trillion onchain
- 7-day average of daily transactions is >521k.
- On the peak day, Canton did >1M daily transactions.
- Since November, they've had >25k users on almost all days.
- They've had >162k in cumulative unique parties.
- Cumulatively, it has burned >1.5B $CC
You can track these metrics here.
$CC is Canton's native token. It launched in early November 2025. But despite the impressive metrics, it's still trading at ~$2.8B, >50% below launch price.
Compared to Ethereum or Solana, this looks cheap. But many crypto native investors struggle to value Canton.
Why?
- You cannot become a validator by simply staking $CC.
- Most activity is institutional, not retail driven.
- Many metrics are not visible on standard crypto dashboards like DefiLlama or Artemis.
- $CC has no realistic path to becoming a store of value asset like BTC, ETH, or SOL.
That last point matters. A large part of public chain valuations comes from their perceived role as non sovereign money.
Canton does not play that game.
But it does dominate a different niche.
Institutions are noticing. And upcoming catalysts could change how crypto investors view it:
- DTCC is tokenizing its assets on Canton.
- Emission halving at epoch 78,840, which will occur around mid-January.
Canton is not decentralized in the cypherpunk sense. It is not a threat to DeFi on Ethereum or Solana.
But if there is a real onchain TradFi category, Canton is positioned to own it.
Sponsored by HeyAnon
HeyAnon: From DeFAI to Pandora
AI is changing everything, including crypto.
HeyAnon was one of the first projects in crypto to properly leverage crypto. They led the DeFAI narrative in early 2025.
It started as an AI-powered DeFi assistant. It then turned into a personalized DeFi command center. Now, they're even expanding to a prediction market.
When you log in, you'll be faced with a customizable home page.
On the right, you'll have a chat interface that acts as your personal DeFi assistant. You talk to it like you'd talk to your techie cousin. You tell it what you want, and it executes. Simple.
But in the bottom left corner, there's a button to see all widgets in the platform. There are many of them.
- A widget for portfolio analysis
- Another way to see all the DeFi positions
- A place where you can store all your favorite prompts
- And more.
You can then pick the widgets you want and add them to your interface. This should allow you to manage most of your DeFi activity from a single interface.
Some of those widgets can make a ton of money for HeyAnon as well. The HyperLiquid widget is a great example. It'll gamify the perp trading through the UI.
This, by itself, is a great DeFAI product.
However, they innovated again with HUD.
HUD is a Chrome extension that overlays the information you want on the platforms that you already use. It'll make crypto research 10x efficient.
For example, did you find an interesting token on DexScreener?
No need for jumping between 10 apps for 10 different metrics. The Hey Anon HUD will bring the data to DexScreener directly.
It's like wearing smart glasses for DeFi. You'll see key information directly over your trading interface. Clean, real-time insights. No friction.
The onchain metrics like first 100 buys, smart money, etc. are great.
The time it takes to do proper technical analysis is often not worth it. But it does have some utility.
Key support and resistance levels are important psychological factors that can influence the market. Moving averages are useful in understanding trends. And so on.
So you do need insights from a TA, ideally, without having to spend hours drawing imaginary lines. And HUD can help you with that.
With HUD, you can ask it to
- Analyse chart
- Generate a trading strategy
- Overlay indicators on the chart
- And more.
And these have been extremely effective. According to the founder of HeyAnon, Daniele Seista, HeyAnon has entered the top 10 referrers on Hyperliquid by average trader profits.
There's a caveat tho: HUD doesn't support obscure ghostchains; it only supports active chains like Solana.
After the DeFAI app and Chrome extension, HeyAnon is now expanding to a new category.
Pandora will be HeyAnon's prediction market platform.
The prediction market was the most successful new category this cycle.
The chart below tracks the notional volume of prediction markets. And it shows the exponential growth of the sector.
In 2024, its volume peaked during the US presidential election. After the elections, mindshare went down a bit. But after 2025 Q3, the prediction market volume has grown steadily. In the last few weeks, it has been doing >$3.6B.
However, the leading prediction markets like Polymarket still have two major problems.
Firstly, the market creation is not permissionless. An average person cannot create a prediction market. Only the team members can.
This is against the principles of crypto. Everyone should be able to create prediction markets in their area of expertise.
Second is the problem of market resolution.
It refers to the difficulty of accurately and fairly determining the outcome of a bet once an event concludes.
Since the events of prediction markets are offchain, the onchain markets have to depend on oracles. But these oracles are often gamed.
In the case of Polymarket, when the outcome is disputed, it is decided by the token voting of $UMA holders. But $UMA whales are often accused of gaming the markets. We've covered one such incident here.
This second problem is connected to the first problem. Since there's no easy way to properly construct a prediction market and set up resolution systems, the leading prediction markets weren't able to allow everyone to create their own markets.
HeyAnon has a solution: AI oracles.
They've been working with AI for some time. Now, they've figured out a way to let the AI decide the results of prediction markets. (HeyAnon allows market creators to add in external oracles. It also has a fallback system where $ANON stakers will vote in case of disputes.)
This also enables Pandora to provide permissionless prediction markets.
In fact, HeyAnon incentivizes people to create their own prediction markets. The creator will get 1% of all the trading volume that happens on their market.
It also doesn't have KYC or any such red tape. So once it launches, it's poised for huge growth.
🚀 DeFi Catalysts
EigenCloud, previously EigenLayer, is discussing the creation of an Incentives Committee to direct EIGEN emissions to productive stake and do buybacks.
Hyper Foundation is proposing a validator vote to burn the $HYPE in the Assistance Fund. It'll remove ~13% of the circulating supply.
Tempo introduced a new native onchain transaction type for real-world payments called Tempo Transactions.
Ondo Finance is expanding its tokenized stocks and ETFs offerings to Solana. It's expected to go live in early 2026.
Uniswap is conducting the final governance vote for the Unification proposal, which will burn ~100m UNI and align the Labs and DAO.
Phantom launched Phantom Connect, a free SDK for developers to enable quick onboarding and make Phantom accounts available across apps.
xStocks are going live on Ton Blockchain. Theoretically, they're expanding to meet Telegram's ecosystem of over 1 billion people.
Kalshi launched Combos. It's a feature that allows users to bundle multiple event outcomes into a single parlay-style contract.
Aave founder Stani Kulechov has published the 2026 Masterplan for Aave. The long-term vision is to become the credit layer for the onchain economy.
📰 Industry News
Coinbase had an event called System Update with many announcements, ranging from prediction markets to Dex trading.
Tether launched PearPass, a peer-to-peer password manager to eliminate cloud breach risks.
ETHGas introduced the ETHGas Foundation. It'll focus on the governance, security, and long-term vision of Realtime Ethereum.
Colosseum introduced the Colosseum STAMP. It's a new investment contract providing alignment between crypto startups and their investors.
🐦⬛ X Hits
- Messari crypto thesis.
- State of based rollups & sync composability.
- The illusion of safety in the yield landscape.
- Explanation of the Indian USDT premium.
- The psychology of perps trading.
😂 Meme
Until next time,
Edgy
Today's email was written by Edgy and Yayya.
DISCLAIMER: I'm NOT a financial advisor. This content is for education and information purposes only. Crypto and DeFi are risky and speculative. Please do your research before investing.
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