Institutional interest in tokenized real-world assets (RWAs) on Canton is accelerating, but many firms still struggle to move from pilot projects to production.
The real barrier is no longer “should we use blockchain?” but “how do we onboard to Canton without building and running complex infrastructure ourselves?”.
What are the Key Barriers to Canton Onboarding?
Infrastructure Complexity: Setting up and running “participant nodes” (servers that manage contracts and transactions on Canton) demands specialized expertise. Without managed operations, maintaining performance and compliance is challenging.
Privacy and Compliance: Other public blockchains expose data, making them unsuitable for many institutional workflows. Canton solves this by enabling selective privacy and auditable transparency, allowing only authorized parties—like regulators or auditors—access as needed.
Scalability and Risk: DIY setups can cause downtime, missed fee opportunities, or compliance gaps, especially as transaction volume or regulatory scrutiny increases.
What Are The Risks of DIY Canton Infrastructure for RWAs?
A do-it-yourself approach looks attractive for early pilots but quickly exposes hidden risks and costs.
Technology teams find themselves managing low-level infrastructure instead of focusing on product innovation and client onboarding. Business stakeholders are left with unanswered questions about operational risk, resilience, and regulatory comfort with the underlying setup.
If validator operations are not monitored and governed to institutional standards, firms risk lost fee and reward flows, delays in critical workflows, and increased scrutiny from risk and compliance teams. As tokenization scales into a multi-trillion market, these weaknesses become strategic liabilities, not just technical annoyances.
How to Implement and Scale Canton Effectively
A more sustainable model treats Canton connectivity as a utility rather than a bespoke project. In this model, institutions consume professionally run “white-label validators” and managed services instead of building and operating their own stack.
These validators meet institutional expectations on uptime, performance, and governance, while still giving firms the control they need over their own applications and data.
Alongside this, secure wallet and vault services—typically using multi-party computation (MPC), where cryptographic keys are split across multiple parties—provide a way to manage transactions and assets safely without exposing raw keys. This combination allows lean teams to adopt Canton, preserve privacy and compliance, and still scale to high volumes without building a large internal blockchain operations function.
Example: An MPC-Secured Custodian Using Canton
Take the tokenized fund trade example from the previous blog in this series. Our global custodian, Acme Bank, uses a managed Canton participant node that hosts separate PartyIDs for Fund A, Fund B, and an internal Custody Ops role. Those PartyIDs hold rights in Daml contracts and participate in the fund issuance and trading workflows.
- Behind the scenes, an MPC-secured wallet controls the keys for these PartyIDs.
- Each key is mathematically split into independent shares held across different systems (for example, the custodian’s own infrastructure, Blockdaemon’s managed service, and an internal HSM), so no single system can reconstruct or misuse the full private key.
- When Fund A redeems tokenized units and Fund B purchases them, the Daml workflow on Canton defines which contracts update and which PartyIDs are involved.
- At the same time, an MPC policy controls who must approve the underlying signature. For instance, Custody Ops plus Blockdaemon for routine transactions, with an additional Acme Bank risk or compliance approver required above a defined threshold.
For the custodian, onboarding does not mean building custom cryptography. Instead, they configure MPC policies and roles (“these users are Ops, these are Approvers, these PartyIDs belong to Fund A and Fund B, this is the $10m limit”).
The managed Canton validator plus MPC wallet enforce those rules consistently whenever a transaction needs to be signed.
What Are The Benefits of Faster Canton Adoption?
Faster Canton deployment unlocks earlier access to private token transactions, continuous collateral mobility, and new yield or liquidity opportunities that are hard to deliver with legacy systems alone.
Plus, by minimizing onboarding friction, business teams can focus on designing new products, client experiences, and revenue models rather than wrestling with infrastructure.
Crucially, treating Canton connectivity as a utility also makes it easier to satisfy regulators and internal risk committees. A clear operating model, backed by specialist operators, helps demonstrate that privacy, resilience, and operational controls are embedded in the architecture rather than bolted on at the last minute.
How Blockdaemon Supports Canton Onboarding
Blockdaemon operates white-label Canton validators on behalf of our clients, so they do not need to design, deploy, and maintain their own node infrastructure from scratch. This gives business and technology stakeholders enterprise-grade connectivity to Canton with clear service levels and governance.
In parallel, Blockdaemon’s MPC-secured wallet and vault solutions offer institutional key management and transaction control, supported by ongoing monitoring and managed operations.
Together, these services allow you to move from pilot to production on Canton quickly and confidently, focusing on business logic and client delivery rather than infrastructure plumbing
Check out the other blogs in this series:
