Digital asset infrastructure developer Digital Asset has officially expanded its oversubscribed funding round, securing strategic investments from Shinhan Financial Group and SC Ventures, the venture capital and innovation arm of Standard Chartered. The additions build directly upon the firm’s previously announced $355 million Series E round led by Andreessen Horowitz’s crypto unit, a16z crypto, which pushed the total raised in the cycle to $365 million at a $2 billion equity valuation.
The strategic entry of Shinhan Financial Group, South Korea’s largest banking conglomerate, complements Digital Asset’s existing regional momentum, following a recent strategic partnership with Hanwha Investment & Securities. Meanwhile, Standard Chartered brings deep institutional connectivity across Asia, Europe, and the Middle East, reinforcing global bank participation on the network.
Solving the Institutional Privacy Paradox in Regulated Finance
The primary hurdle to public blockchain adoption among Tier-1 financial institutions has historically centered on privacy and regulatory compliance. Traditional public ledgers expose transaction details, counterparty identities, and balance sheet data, creating immediate friction with global bank privacy laws and competitive safeguards.
Digital Asset designed its public Layer-1 blockchain, the Canton Network, specifically to address this barrier. Canton operates as an interoperable “network of networks” that grants institutional participants sub-second execution, interoperable asset transfers, and collateral mobility while maintaining absolute sub-ledger privacy and control.
Deployment Strategy for Real-World Asset Tokenization
Digital Asset plans to deploy the fresh capital to expand offerings across the Canton ecosystem, deepen engagement with financial software developers, and accelerate the migration of regulated workflows onto the network. Canton already supports over 700 ecosystem participants, facilitating production-grade institutional applications such as Broadridge’s Distributed Ledger Repo (DLR), which processes over $7 trillion in monthly volume, and landmark on-chain US Treasury settlements.
According to Digital Asset CEO Yuval Rooz, the participation of top-tier global banks proves that institutional blockchain adoption has shifted from experimental pilots to production-ready market infrastructure built on shared, privacy-compliant ledgers.
