Canton, Arc, and Tempo: Three Lessons About Crypto

New blockchains are fundraising at multi-billion-dollar valuations. Here’s what it tells us.

Sometimes news comes in waves. In those moments, you should pay attention, because it means something important is happening.

For instance, on Monday, the stablecoin issuer Circle announced it had raised $222 million on a $3 billion valuation for its new blockchain project, Arc. Investors included BlackRock, Apollo, and the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange, among others.

One day earlier, news broke that Digital Asset— creator of the Canton Network, another relatively new blockchain—was raising $300 million at a $2 billion valuation, in a round led by a16z.

Both follow a string of recent announcements around Stripe's Tempo blockchain, which raised $500 million late last year at a $5 billion valuation and has since announced partnerships with DoorDash, Visa, and others.

The three blockchains—Arc, Canton, and Tempo—are purpose-built for stablecoins and tokenization. The wave of developments reminds me of three important things about crypto.

1) Money Follows Legislation

Each of these multi-hundred-million-dollar raises occurred after Congress passed the stablecoin-focused Genius Act in July 2025.

I’m convinced that the sluggish pace of crypto legislation in the run-up to the Genius Act slowed investment into the market; institutions were reluctant to build businesses and blockchains on uncertain regulatory footing. Recent progress suggests that could be changing. There is no way to know if these raises would have occurred at these valuations absent the Genius Act, but I can’t imagine it hurt.

The obvious question for investors is what opportunities the Clarity Act—crypto’s comprehensive market-structure bill—will unleash if it manages to get through Congress. Clarity is far more sweeping than Genius, and the final text of the bill is not complete, so it’s harder to draw one-for-one relationships. The most likely winners will be tokenization efforts and other pieces of regulated financial infrastructure. I’m hopeful that the final text will be supportive of DeFi and novel token designs as well, but we will have to wait for the final text. Clarity bears watching.

2) Privacy May Be a Killer App

One thing Arc, Canton, and Tempo share—and that separates them from Ethereum and Solana—is native support for private transactions.

This makes intuitive sense as crypto moves into mainstream commerce. The transparency that makes public blockchains trustworthy can also be a liability. If you're a business broadcasting every trade before it's complete, or a worker whose paycheck is visible to anyone with a block explorer, that transparency is a bug, not a feature. Even the fiercest advocates of blockchain transparency acknowledge there’s a place for discretion in the world of business. These new chains are betting that privacy, baked in from the start, is what real-world institutions actually need. The recent capital raises suggest they're on the right path.

3) Corporates Are Going To Compete

Arc, Canton, and Tempo are notable for their corporate backing. Arc is being developed by Circle, a publicly traded company. Canton’s backers include Goldman Sachs, Citadel, DTCC, Nasdaq, BNY Mellon, S&P Global, and Virtu, among others. Tempo is a joint project of Stripe and Paradigm, with design input from Anthropic, Deutsche Bank, Revolut, Shopify, Visa, and OpenAI.

By comparison, Ethereum was started by a 19-year-old college dropout writing in a Bitcoin forum, and Solana was dreamed up by a Qualcomm engineer during a late-night “eureka” moment.

That’s not to say the corporates will win; my money is mostly on the crypto natives, actually. But banks and big-name businesses are going to bring a new level of capital, execution, and professionalism to the space. I suspect the entire space will accelerate as competition drives us to new frontiers.

After all, steel sharpens steel.

Risks and Important Information

No Advice on Investment; Risk of Loss: Prior to making any investment decision, each investor must undertake its own independent examination and investigation, including the merits and risks involved in an investment, and must base its investment decision—including a determination whether the investment would be a suitable investment for the investor—on such examination and investigation.

Crypto assets are digital representations of value that function as a medium of exchange, a unit of account, or a store of value, but they do not have legal tender status. Crypto assets are sometimes exchanged for U.S. dollars or other currencies around the world, but they are not currently backed nor supported by any government or central bank. Their value is completely derived by market forces of supply and demand, and they are more volatile than traditional currencies, stocks, or bonds.

Trading in crypto assets comes with significant risks, including volatile market price swings or flash crashes, market manipulation, and cybersecurity risks and risk of losing principal or all of your investment. In addition, crypto asset markets and exchanges are not regulated with the same controls or customer protections available in equity, option, futures, or foreign exchange investing.

Crypto asset trading requires knowledge of crypto asset markets. In attempting to profit through crypto asset trading, you must compete with traders worldwide. You should have appropriate knowledge and experience before engaging in substantial crypto asset trading. Crypto asset trading can lead to large and immediate financial losses. Under certain market conditions, you may find it difficult or impossible to liquidate a position quickly at a reasonable price.

The opinions expressed represent an assessment of the market environment at a specific time and are not intended to be a forecast of future events, or a guarantee of future results, and are subject to further discussion, completion and amendment. The information herein is not intended to provide, and should not be relied upon for, accounting, legal or tax advice, or investment recommendations. You should consult your accounting, legal, tax or other advisors about the matters discussed herein.