Goldman, Microsoft, Deloitte, Cboe, and others plan to test the Canton Network blockchain in July 2023, linking apps using Digital Asset's Daml smart contract
Context & Ripple Effects
The planned trial extends a long institutional relationship: Goldman had previously joined IBM in backing Digital Asset, linking the test to an earlier effort to bring blockchain technology into established finance Goldman’s earlier Digital Asset investment.
Later coverage gives the pilot a clearer arc: Digital Asset raised $135 million for Canton in 2025 a later Canton funding round, and DTCC subsequently selected Canton as a tokenization partner DTCC’s Canton tokenization selection. Those developments do not prove this test succeeded, but they show why early interoperability testing mattered.
First-order effects
- Goldman, Microsoft, Deloitte, Cboe and the other participants gain a shared July test environment for assessing whether separate applications can interact through Daml smart contracts.
- Digital Asset gets a high-profile institutional proving ground for Canton and Daml; the immediate outcome is technical and operational feedback, not a production-market rollout.
Second-order effects
- A multi-firm test raises the value of common application and data standards: participants can identify where bespoke integrations, privacy controls, or workflow differences prevent interoperability.
- Competing enterprise-blockchain and financial-market infrastructure providers face a stronger incentive to demonstrate comparable cross-application connectivity to the same institutional buyers.
Third-order effects
- If repeated pilots progress into operational deployments, blockchain competition in financial markets may shift from standalone ledgers toward interoperable networks that can support regulated workflows across firms.
- The later involvement of a clearinghouse suggests that adoption will hinge less on blockchain branding than on whether networks can fit existing custody, clearing, and tokenization arrangements; that outcome remains contingent on implementation and regulatory acceptance.
The trend: This is an early data point in financial institutions testing interoperable, privacy-aware blockchain networks before committing core market workflows to them.