Banks top up Digital Asset funding to $365m at $2bn valuation
South Korea's Shinhan Financial Group and Standard Chartered have expanded a $365 million funding round for blockchain developer Digital Asset, signaling deepening traditional finance investment in compliant institutional networks.
Digital Asset has secured an additional $10 million from Shinhan Financial Group and SC Ventures, the venture arm of Standard Chartered. The investment brings the blockchain developer’s recently announced funding round to $365 million, up from $355 million, while maintaining its $2 billion equity valuation.
The extended round underscores the sustained appetite among legacy financial institutions for enterprise distributed ledger technology. The initial $355 million portion was led by Andreessen Horowitz's crypto fund and drew participation from a cross-section of global finance. Backers include HSBC, BNP Paribas, Apollo Funds, Citadel Securities, CME Ventures, S&P Global, SBI Group, and the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority.
Digital Asset is the creator of the Canton Network, a public Layer 1 blockchain built specifically for regulated entities. Unlike typical public networks, Canton is engineered to let institutions synchronize assets and applications onchain while preserving the strict data privacy and operational control demanded by global regulators.
The influx of capital from Standard Chartered and Shinhan points to growing Asian institutional interest in this specific infrastructure. "Their participation reinforces the need for infrastructure that enables regulated financial institutions to operate on shared networks without compromising privacy, compliance, or control," said Yuval Rooz, co-founder and CEO of Digital Asset.
Shinhan's Seonghun Hong framed the investment as a targeted regional play. He noted that the bank sees a significant opportunity to build trusted onchain financial infrastructure in South Korea as institutional interest in digital assets accelerates across Asia.
Market participants are already pricing in the network's potential utility. Canton's native CC token was changing hands at roughly $0.13, up 2 percent over the past 24 hours. That prices the token's market capitalization at nearly $5 billion, a figure that stands in stark contrast to the company's $2 billion private valuation and highlights the premium traders are placing on the network's adoption.
