Digital Asset co-founder and CEO Yuval Rooz sat down for an in-depth interview, tracing his journey from Citadel and DRW to building the Canton Network. His central thesis: RWA is the most important long-term opportunity beyond Bitcoin, and its success hinges on a specific type of on-chain privacy—not anonymity, but auditable privacy.
From High-Frequency Trading to Crypto Entrepreneurship
Rooz joined Citadel for risk modeling, then moved to DRW for algorithmic trading. By 2013, DRW was deeply involved in crypto, and Rooz led its venture capital arm, investing only in directions highly relevant to the firm's own business. By late 2014, he concluded that blockchain technology itself represented a larger opportunity than Bitcoin, and left to found Digital Asset.
RWA and Privacy: Two Sides of the Same Coin
Rooz argues that Bitcoin remains the only truly unique asset class; everything else is about solving "what comes after Bitcoin"—and that is RWA. However, RWA requires privacy for both retail and institutional users. He points out that today's crypto world has virtually no privacy: public ledgers allow front-running and information asymmetry. Canton offers "auditable privacy": transactions are invisible to unauthorized parties, but regulators can access them under lawful conditions.
Stablecoins and Treasuries First: Canton's Asset Roadmap
Canton already hosts stablecoins, U.S. Treasuries, money market funds, mortgages, insurance products, commodities, structured products, fixed income, private equity, and private credit. Rooz expects stablecoins and Treasuries to scale fastest, serving as payment rails and efficient collateral management tools in derivatives trading.
DTCC Partnership: Tokenizing Real Stocks, Not Derivatives
Two days before the interview, Canton announced a partnership with the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC), which holds $100 trillion in assets under custody. DTCC chose Canton as its first blockchain network for real-world assets. Rooz emphasizes that tokenized stocks on Canton will be actual securities, not derivatives—holders will appear on Apple's official shareholder register.
Balancing Privacy and Regulation: Against Anonymity
Regarding the tension between privacy and oversight, Rooz says regulators oppose anonymity, not privacy. Citing medical confidentiality, he argues that Canton's mechanism allows auditing when legally required, but not constant surveillance.
Tokenomics Shift: Rewarding Application Builders
Unlike most L1s where validators capture most fees, Canton's design increasingly allocates incentives to application layers. Rooz notes that by year-end, a "second halving" will further reduce infrastructure providers' share. He sees this as a key reason many teams build L2s—they want to keep value creation for themselves. Canton's foundation is offering grants for developers to add new features.
Rooz's near-term goal: push Canton into the top three (from current top ten) in the "no on-chain fee" ranking, and keep building "the new Wall Street on-chain" rather than merely tokenizing Wall Street.