Digital Asset Eyes $300M Raise at $2B Valuation With a16z Crypto Leading the Round

TLDR:

• Digital Asset is targeting $300M at a $2B valuation, with a16z crypto set to lead the funding round.
• Canton Network has processed over $6 trillion in tokenized assets, drawing major institutional backers globally.
• A16z crypto raised $2.2B for its fifth fund, bringing total dedicated crypto capital to roughly $10 billion.
• Crypto venture deal counts dropped sharply to 97 in Q1 2026, down from 427 in the same quarter last year.

Digital Asset Holdings, the company behind the Canton Network blockchain, is in talks to raise approximately $300 million at a valuation of around $2 billion.

Bloomberg reported the round on Sunday, citing sources familiar with the matter. The financing, led by a16z crypto, is expected to close within weeks. Final figures could still shift before the deal is sealed.

a16z Crypto Takes the Lead in Major Institutional Blockchain Bet

The raise marks a sharp jump from Digital Asset’s earlier funding rounds. In June 2025, the company secured $135 million led by DRW Venture Capital and Tradeweb Markets. Goldman Sachs, Citadel Securities, and DTCC also participated in that round.

A follow-on raise of $50 million came in December 2025 from BNY Mellon, Nasdaq, S&P Global, and iCapital. The new $300 million round would therefore represent a substantial step up in both size and valuation.

For a16z crypto, the investment follows the firm raising $2.2 billion for its fifth dedicated crypto fund. That brings the firm’s total crypto capital to roughly $10 billion across five vehicles.

A16z general partner Ali Yahya addressed the privacy question directly in January, writing that privacy is “the critical missing feature preventing global finance from fully moving onchain.”

That view aligns directly with what Canton Network offers. Unlike Ethereum or Solana, Canton is built with protocol-level privacy and confidentiality guarantees. Those features are central to its pitch for institutional adoption.

Canton Network Gains Traction Across Institutional Finance

Canton is a public, permissionless Layer 1 blockchain with configurable privacy tools. It supports smart contracts written in Digital Asset’s open-source language, Daml.

The network is designed to handle tokenized asset workflows while keeping transaction data confidential between parties.

Institutional momentum has been building steadily. More than $6 trillion in tokenized assets have been issued or processed on the network. In March, Visa became a Canton Super Validator, marking the payments company’s first blockchain governance role.

Visa later added Canton to its stablecoin settlement pilot in April, alongside Base, Polygon, Arc, and Tempo. Also in March, a project called Zenith completed atomic swaps between Canton and an EVM-compatible environment, opening a potential bridge to Ethereum developers.

In November, Canton Strategic Holdings raised $540 million to build a Canton Coin treasury. Backers included DRW, ARK Invest, and Kraken. The broader venture picture, however, remains uneven.

Quarterly crypto deal counts fell to 97 in Q1 2026, down from 427 in the same period a year earlier, per The Block. Some historically active crypto funds are increasingly shifting focus toward AI and robotics.