We made our commitment to
@CantonNetwork in Q1 2025, almost 1.5 years ago now. That shift took
@ZenithFdn building for real-time proving (sub ~12s blocks) for the Ethereum Foundation to then investigate RISC-V for Canton.
After co-architecting and redesigning the solution with guidance from
@digitalasset's CPO and CTO, we found a solution that unlocked the greatest network contribution: deploying Canton subnets with value-aligned EVM (and SVM) atomicity.
Appreciate you spotting us
@zackabrams in this
@a16z/
@a16zcrypto investment piece. Organic awareness and education like this are critical in becoming part of the long-term conversation. We're humbled to be included here.
Here's our value prop:
Zenith isn't another narrative piggybacking EVM wrapper. I've been following and working tangentially with Digital Asset for nearly a decade with the same vision of bringing blockchain to global capital markets, so I immediately knew the potential that Canton Network was offering from the jump.
Our team committed itself to building alongside
@digitalasset long before all of the big press releases, partnerships, and fundraising announcements. We've been some of the earliest and most vocal Web3 advocates amplifying educational materials and championing
@yuvalrooz.
Why this is different from any L2 or rollup:
Politically:
โ Deep, consensus-level integration: As a Tier-1 Super Validator with max governing weight (sitting alongside DTCC, Nasdaq, Visa, etc.), Zenith doesn't sit "on top" of
@CantonFdn it participates day after day within its governance, foundation, and global synchronizer.
Technically:
โ external_call() gives deterministic, atomic composability between Daml contracts and unmodified Solidity/Rust code in the same transaction. No multi-phase hacks. No economic trust assumptions. Real atomicity at the protocol level.
โ Dynamic scaling that protects the base layer: Zenith absorbs high-frequency EVM execution pressure (parallel VBs, horizontal sharding) so Canton Mainnet stays lean for low-latency settlement and privacy. Every EVM TX still routes through the Global Synchronizer.
Economically:
โ Weโre the direct conduit to every major stablecoin issuer, DeFi protocol, and ERC tokenization engine in Web3. These teams all want to mitigate the multi-quarter delay of a new language and necessitate the immediacy of lift-and-shift repos.
โ With Zenith, they deploy as-is, instantly tap Cantonโs institutional access, incentivization mechanisms, and settlement rails, and GTM without a second thought.
I cannot emphasize this enough. THIS IS FULLY ACCRETIVE AND NON-EXTRACTIVE.
Every Zenith transaction burns
$CC as if it were a TX on Canton Mainnet. It increases base-layer utility through mature, production-grade protocols, connects institutions to DeFi apps requested across multiple RFPs we've seen, and creates sustainable dogfooding of transaction volume for the entire Canton ecosystem.
Developers get familiar tooling and massive real-world liquidity. Canton gets the developer flywheel and usage that makes
$CC more than just a settlement token, it becomes a direct reflection of the intended onchain capital markets activity. This is the exact flywheel prescribed by
@cantonstrategic and
@markwendlandcsh.
We didn't build another sidechain. We built the onramp that lets Ethereum and Solana's innovation machine plug directly into the only L1 that's already moving trillions for Wall Street.
This is how you close the gap between crypto-native velocity and institutional-grade rails. Not by forcing institutions onto public memepools, but by bringing battle-tested dev tooling onto rails that were purpose-built for regulated scale. It's the Trojan Horse in
@wesarn_real and
@ShaulKfir's anecdote; it's boiling the frog.
$CC burns that actually matter.
Long-term conviction.
Real alignment.
@ZenithFdn
Zth.