YZi Labs Teams Up With Goldman Sachs & Citadel in $135M Canton Network Power Play

Wall Street heavyweights and crypto innovators collide in a nine-figure blockchain bet.

The $135 million injection into Canton Network signals institutional FOMO is alive and well—even if half these suits still can't explain how smart contracts work.

Goldman and Citadel bringing TradFi firepower while YZi Labs supplies the Web3 know-how. The perfect marriage of institutional capital and crypto-native tech—or another case of dinosaurs buying shovels during a gold rush?

One thing's certain: when the suits start writing checks this big, the smart money pays attention. Even if they're just trying to hedge against their own obsolescence.

The institutional onchain revolution takes shape

YZi Labs’ investment in Digital Asset can be seen as a strategic play to participate in the growth of blockchain infrastructure that finally meets Wall Street’s demands. Traditional finance has long viewed public blockchains with skepticism, wary of exposing sensitive transactions to full transparency, while private chains remain isolated and cumbersome.

Canton Network’s configurable privacy model changes that equation, allowing institutions to control data visibility without sacrificing interoperability. That’s why YZi Labs, alongside Goldman Sachs and Citadel, sees Canton as the missing LINK for tokenizing real-world assets at scale.

With the $135 million capital injection, the Canton Network plans to accelerate its expansion, focusing on three key areas: infrastructure scalability, faster onboarding for regulated entities, and deeper interoperability between applications.

According to the announcement, the network’s roadmap over the next 12 to 18 months includes new live deployments, global market expansion, and more seamless application-level composability.

“This investment from YZi Labs reinforces the growing demand for blockchain infrastructure that meets the rigorous standards of global financial markets, Yuval Rooz, Co-Founder and CEO of Digital Asset, said. “With this new backing, we’re advancing our mission to bring trillions of dollars more in real-world assets on-chain, creating a more connected and efficient financial ecosystem.”

YZi Labs’ involvement also signals a strategic pivot under its rebrand from Binance Labs. Since Changpeng Zhao stepped back from Binance’s exchange operations, YZi has doubled down on infrastructure bridging crypto and traditional systems.

Its March investment in Plume Network, a modular blockchain for real-world assets, mirrors the Canton playbook: enabling institutions to tokenize everything from carbon credits to private equity.

Similarly, backing AI-data startup Vana and token distribution platform Sign earlier this year reveals a pattern: YZi isn’t chasing speculative DeFi trends but funding rails for mass adoption. The firm claims to manage over $10 billion in assets globally.