Canton Strategic Holdings, Inc. Common Stock 0 Earnings Call

Hello, everyone. Good morning. I'm Mark Wendland, CEO and Chairman of Canton Strategic Holdings. I'd like you to welcome to the Canton Network Ecosystem Update Q2 2026. This is our second webinar, excited to talk about what happened in the last quarter and also look forward into Q3. It's been a very busy quarter, so we have a lot to cover. Without further ado, I'd like to welcome our guests that we have with us today. Hannah Burgess, Head of Business Development, which will kick things off. We also have a special guest of honor, Luke Farrell, to talk on CASHIN and the product there, and we will spend time in the deep dive topic of this quarter. Without further ado, I'll let Hannah dive into Q2 review.

Hello. As Mark mentioned, I am Hannah Burgess. I am the Head of Business Development at Canton Strategic Holdings. I'll be walking you through some of the core highlights from our ecosystem report, as well as providing additional color on the network's growth and institutional adoption, notable transactions, including the DTCC's tokenization pilot, and governance changes. There are many different metrics you can look at to assess activity on Canton, looking at them holistically is going to tell the bigger story about the state of the network. Overall, the volume of total transactions increased in Q2. Transactions per second, or TPS, also increased, this is often used as a way for understanding the throughput and interoperability of the network. The data here shows that there were more cross-application workflows settled on Canton per second in Q2 than what we saw in Q1.

For those of you that tuned in to our first quarter webinar, you may recall our discussion on the Burn-Mint Equilibrium, or BME. BME is a core metric in Canton's tokenomics and looks at the total amount of CC burned over a period as a ratio of the CC minted. We saw improvement in BME in Q2. We are always headed towards one, this was primarily driven by lower issuance after the halving from Q1, as well as a marginal increase in CC burned, shown here as protocol fees. One of the likely contributing factors for this burn figure was as mature applications are optimizing their workflows and looking for cash or looking for capital efficiencies in their workflows. It's something that we will be watching closely over the quarters to come and will be able to speak on more as time goes on.

Institutional engagement happened across the major layers and participation features on the Canton Network. We added three new Super Validators to the set in Q2. Stock Gen and Franklin Templeton have historically been involved in the Canton Network, their approval as Super Validators deepens this engagement. Further Asset Management was also approved as a Super Validator, will act as a regional aggregation layer for Canton in the Gulf states. In alignment with Canton's mission to transform global financial markets, we highlighted in our report to watch the adoption grow across the APAC region. Positive momentum has been building in Korea and Japan, most recently seen through ecosystem partnerships with some of Korea's largest companies, Canton's inclusion in the Japanese Government Bond, JGB, Working Group.

On the validator side, the inclusion of new institutions like the CME, Citadel, Northern Trust, and others are proof points in the maturity of digital assets, strategies, and initiatives. Running a validator is not a light lift, and this speaks to the coordination that must have occurred with different business leads, operations, risk, legal, compliance, engineering, and others in order for these nodes to go live. From here, these institutions will be able to engage with others on the network and start to build applications of their own. On the application side, the number of Featured Apps on Canton increased twofold throughout Q2. Decentralized exchanges and other marketplaces have maintained their stake as the core activity drivers on the network, and issuers have focused on bringing more crypto and Real-World Assets on chain for use in trading, collateral management, and capital deployment opportunities.

In Q2, we witnessed multiple headline trades that further speak to how the lines between DeFi and TradFi are blurring. HSBC completed their tokenized deposit pilot, which marked their first issuance on a public blockchain. This is a substantial step forward in the use of tokenized cash on Canton. On-chain repo is something that we talk about a lot here and is a major pocket of activity on Canton. What makes the on-chain repo trade between DRW and HIFI so interesting was that it was executed using Tradeweb's RFQ platform with Marex as the prime broker. Here we have a crypto native application exchanging tokenized treasuries and cash with a large market maker, all happening simultaneously and seamlessly across TradFi and crypto rails. In comparison with the repo trade, Franklin Templeton actually sold a tokenized treasury to Virtu Financial outside of normal market hours.

This demonstrated the full ownership transfer of a tokenized security on Canton and is a major step forward in market making on tokenized assets. Many of these trades and a lot of the building that has occurred on Canton to date has really had the DTCC's tokenization program in mind. I will now pass it over to Mark Wendland, who can speak more to the successful pilot completed last Wednesday.

Thank you, Hannah. Yeah, I just cannot underscore the importance of DTC and what they are and how they function within the U.S. markets. They are the largest CSD in the largest markets in the world. Their involvement in this pilot transaction was just breaking down the numbers of what it was. It involved over 30 institutions that participated in the pilot transaction. It was 20 transactions across four asset classes, seven different transaction types, and across two blockchains. Just by breaking down those numbers, those are more than just a one-off trade. Those underscore the importance of what the pilot brings, which goes into the successful launch in October, is what we're hoping for.

Just going in a little bit deeper of what those numbers represent, the four different asset classes, you're talking about U.S. treasuries, collateral in equities, ETFs, and also stablecoins. The transaction types were collateral margin movements, repo, sec lending, delivery versus payment on U.S. treasuries, delivery versus payment on equities, ETFs, conversions, and also cross-chain transfers. Covered a wide range of activity, which all highlights what we're looking for in the launch in October, the go live aspect. This is more than a proof of concept. This is actual driving value to users, and that's why you saw a large number of users wanting to participate. It had a large blast radius in what it covered and really excited to what that brings as we come through with the next quarter. Hannah, I'll turn it back to you for governance.

Moving away from live trades, the second quarter was incredibly busy on the governance side. There were nine Canton Improvement Proposals or CIPs that were approved within the last three months, and others that were approved in previous quarters that also went live during Q2. These initiatives cover a variety of things, from protocol upgrades, to adding logical synchronizers, to improving token standards and fostering accountability for some of the network's largest stakeholders. CIP-105 and 116 make up what we commonly refer to as the locking frameworks. It started with CIP-105, which was approved in Q1, but went live officially in April. This CIP created a framework for Super Validators that required them to lock up a percentage of their historically earned rewards, as well as future rewards in order to maintain their forward reward weight.

In year one, the percentage is 70%, these will step down through the end of the program or the continuation of the program, and it will happen annually. CIP-116 extended this principle to the application layer, applications are required to commit capital on chain in order to gain and maintain Featured App designation. For applications that issue assets natively on the network, the requirement is a bit higher at 25 million Canton Coin, while non-issuers are required to post 5 million Canton Coin. I will now hand it over to Mark Wendland again and Luke Farrell, who will be able to speak more to what this means for the network on the long term.

Thanks, Hannah. Now, we're going to deep dive into a particular topic, which we are very happy to have a guest of honor here, Luke Farrell, CEO of CASHIN. Luke, why don't you just tell us about yourself?

With Ergoinia as our backer in late February to build credit markets on Canton. Given my background, which was most recently Head of Capital Markets at Maple Finance and prior a Portfolio Manager at PIMCO, our focus was always clearly going to be on products for institutional clients. Canton was, of course, a natural fit to build our products. As we thought about what to build first, the most common question we got and thought we had was: How do you earn yield on Canton Coin? At the same time, we thought about yield strategies, carry strategies, trading strategies, other type of yield-generating ideas. The governance side, as Hannah mentioned, SV locking was passing in end of March and April, and we viewed kind of FA locking as an eventuality.

Where we ended up was building what exists today as the Cashin delegated lock marketplace, and happy to talk more about that with you, Mark.

Yeah. Thanks, Luke. Canton Network passed CIP-105, I think it was back in April, and CIP-116, which we'll cover kind of what those are. Why don't you just talk a little bit more about what CASHIN is and kind of what problem it was trying to solve and kind of how it came to be?

Sure. There's a clear opportunity with the governance changes.

With the governance changes We had Canton Coin holders who were looking for risk-adjusted yield sources in a very safe way, and we also had a structural demand for locked CC emerge.

SVs might have had life-to-date rewards that they had to lock. As we looked forward to Featured App, which is kind of the focus of where CASHIN has cemented, we believe that the builder's balance sheet, capital was going to be used and should be used for growth, and there was going to be the need for third-party holders to basically provide that locked capital requirement for them so that they could get their Featured App status, maintain that status, and continue deploying their capital in the most efficient way into their products that make the network more robust. CASHIN's marketplace is a bilateral marketplace for these delegated locks.

I call them delegated locks because they're not loans, which makes them very capital efficient and safe for the suppliers. They are structured as open-term delegations on a fixed APR basis. The economics look and feel like a loan, but the assets don't transfer to the Featured App. That's important for the supplier side or the holders of CC because they keep the coins in their custody. We support self-hosted wallets, qualified custodians like Copper and BitGo, and the coins get locked in their possession, but they basically point the lock attribution to the Featured App to who they're facing on the CASHIN deal. CASHIN manages liquidity aggregation, execution of the deals. All the deals are negotiable on terms for rate and duration, which basically takes offline conversations and negotiation and brings it into an engine on platform.

We also handle the settlement and accounting and invoicing for the interest every month.

That last piece, the operational efficiency is definitely something that as being a user of it is definitely a value add associated with it. I think it just understates what you said there is the creative way that you've taken to solve for kind of the problem or what people are trying to achieve, which is to get and achieve locked Canton Coin to satisfy the CIP. For those that aren't familiar what CIP stands for, that stands for a Canton Improvement Proposal. Like other networks have different requirements about how to access becoming a Super Validator or becoming access to a network. For Canton, it's about how are you actually benefiting the network versus a monetary threshold. These were proposals that were published by the foundation.

We'll talk a little bit about what was the reason why and kind of how to think about that aspect of it. Luke, do you want to start? Then I'll kind of fill in on some of that as well.

Sure. Yeah. The goal of the network is always for both the SVs and FA locking is to promote committed long-term participation in the network. It's put your money where your mouth is. Come in, there's an emissions schedule that you can participate in, but they've added two levers. You need to have capital commitment in order to have a designation that allows you to mint reward coupons, then you also have to deliver on what you're building. That goes into some of the other CIPs that are in flight, which is traffic-based app rewards. If you generate more traffic from real users with assets that are used by many people, you will get rewarded more.

This is a shift from earlier design, and it's very intentional to basically self-select or screen those who are bringing real utility and real value to the network over time. Where we see the value in CASHIN and is also the ability of the capital holders, who are clearly very involved and committed to the network by holding Canton Coin, and many of them run different infrastructure nodes on their own. They get to support the Featured App who are coming. The positive effect of how you deploy your capital while earning yield is that it's going to a very productive source, which is new applications that are going to bring new use cases, new markets, new traffic, and of course, new burn.

It's the example of maturation of the network. It's not a correction, it's iterative governance and really trying to align incentives for market participants. You think about CIP-105, which is a Super Validator locking, and Super Validators play a very integral role to the network. They're infrastructure providers validating the transactions on top of the network. You want those participants to have aligned incentives into the long-term growth. What Canton's building isn't kind of a momentum, it's the infrastructure for an underpinning of our financial markets. It's not just a kind of flash element. It's very important that it's stable, and has the long-term incentives for those participants building on top of the network. It started with CIP-105, which is the Super Validators, and then you go into the Featured App aspect as well.

Those CIPs created this need for Canton Coin, for those that didn't necessarily have Canton Coin already in their possession to be able to do so, or optimization of how their capital stack. As a network participant, Canton Strategic obviously has a lot of Canton Coins, and the ability to use those Canton Coins for the benefit of our company and our shareholders, but also for the benefit of those applications and those Super Validators to bring them into the network. We saw an opportunity where there was a need for that. As a participant and a large holder of Canton Coin, we decided to structure our business around that in order to generate yield on our Canton Coin, and ultimately return for shareholders. I think we tried to think about how to do so in a commercial way.

It can be structured in a variety of different ways. It can be in a way where you're just kind of paying an interest rate associated with the Canton Coin. It could also be in some sort of commercial relationship where you're doing a revenue share or cross rewards, or it could also be an investment into the ecosystem. Canton Strategic is meant to be an investor in the network as a whole. This allows us to build a business around helping support and partnering with those who are building on top of the network, and helping them satisfy their needs of acquiring Canton Coin to participate in these networks.

Yeah. Bring up a good point. Oh, sorry, Mark. No, go ahead.

I said bring up a good point I hit, which is as an operator, as an SV, and a deployer into locked loans for, or locked delegations for FAs. There are many other SVs or groups that do the same thing. It does really show the alignment to the Featured App group and the compliance and rules that now evolved of this is a better mechanism to get real positive traction out of the group that's coming. I was just wondering, maybe you could talk a little bit about how much is currently locked across the network, and what that means for just general adoption and traction.

It's almost right at 50% of overall supply is locked across the two. You have just under 20 billion Canton Coin that's locked. 18.26 billion is locked across the Super Validators, across 42 Super Validators as of last look. Featured App, you have about 1.3 billion across 100 Featured App. That to me, reading into that, you see true economic skin in the game by these participants, putting up a significant of the outstanding float in a locked form for the network. Which again, shows the broad participation of the network and the traction that it's gaining, but also the economic alignment, going back to the incentives of what were we trying to accomplish through this iteration of this CIP.

That just speaks to not only are you seeing institutions raise their hand and want to get involved in the network, but they're also willing to put their money where their mouth is, and actually put up capital to grow in the network. That to me shows very bullishness around the commitment to the network as a whole.

I agree. On the behavior side of the Featured App, I can talk a little bit about, let's say in the last month since the deadline of compliance going live. June 19th was the Featured App CIP-116 deadline to get locked or lose status. We onboarded and helped with 30 deals in the first week we launched. We launched about a week or 10 days prior to the 19th to get ready. You had the existing set of Featured App that needed to choose whether they're going to lock and maintain that status and get rewards, and then you had some that did not do that. There was always a question of what's going to happen after that deadline. Since the 19th, in the last month, we've seen a very consistent inbound interest to lock.

Now that the rules are set and the mechanics are sort of in place, it made the decision on what the economics look like, and if you were on the fence, you might have waited for that to pass before you did something. We've seen new applications with a lot of very interesting use cases coming to the foundation. A lot of them, about 70% of the entries to be to the applying group are getting their locks through Cashin. We're seeing at the very early stage the type of builders that are coming. We're talking to them, we know what they're doing, who they are, which is really helping on a quality filter level. We work with Canton Strategic Holdings on this. There's a lot of interested parties and the foundation on how these apps get approved and what they're doing.

I think the second order impact of other than capital lockup is the quality screen. The other interesting part is existing apps that had one project are adding new Featured App. If someone had a marketplace and they had a standard Featured App, some of them are now, there's a lot more activity on the asset issuance side. Those Featured App need larger amount of capital locked up. We're seeing existing groups who are well-known add Featured App, which require them to take out new locks for new party IDs. We're seeing kind of both of these new and existing lines go up. The demand is really a good signal for the network, in my opinion.

Yes. I think if you look at how we've kind of built these businesses, commercial relationships, and continue to try and evolve and think creative about how to solve for those networks, I think that's an element of the iteration governance that we've done, and the capital efficiency that people are looking at and going through their network, and how to achieve that. I think what do you see, Luke, as far as the evolution of kind of Cashin's business? Obviously, this unique locking service, as you mentioned, isn't really a loan, and isn't necessarily secured lending where you have elements like credit risk and things like that associated with it. These are kind of unique structure around how you capture that. I think just talking a little bit about how you see the evolution of your business as well would be helpful.

Yeah, sure. We haven't announced our official roadmap yet. I can give you some previews of what we're thinking about without trying to nail it down. There's two thoughts. One is, can we offer this yield source to a wider audience? That could take the form of a tokenized version of this yield strategy. The other side would be looking at and acknowledging there are other groups working on other yield strategies for CC, like carry strategies, which are dependent on lending markets, or volatility harvest strategies, which are dependent on liquidity of the token.

How do we plug in and help those products scale, whether it's capital attribution or aggregation for them, or building the actual lending markets in a very robust way to support borrowing against CC so that you can do kind of some of the traditional carry strategies and deploy loan stablecoins into other dollar yielding strategies. Those are definitely things that are right top of mind on how to do them correctly. The other type would be to look at businesses for SVs, where right now we're focused on FAs. Variety of financing or other ways to make capital efficiency and their businesses run more smoothly.

Got it. Does requiring capital commitment make it easier or harder to attract builders to the network, in your opinion?

That's a great question. I think in a vacuum, it makes it harder because you need capital. What it does is I think it filters first who is serious about it. If people give it thought on how will I meet this obligation because I have a really good idea, I'm really interested in building on Canton, then they go down the path of how to solve a problem, and the problem is how to get the capital. Without a marketplace like CASHIN, without participants like Canton Strategic Holdings that are willing to back the right ideas and the best Featured App, this would be a non-solvable problem, or at least very difficult. One of the ways we've built CASHIN is to standardize these deals into a platform, right?

That, I think, adds the ability for any number of suppliers or aggregation of Canton Coin that want to do locks and get them into a standard deal format where the Featured App can access multiple liquidity sources in large scalable size in one place. The awareness of where to get it has made that job very easy. I don't think it's hard from the capital sourcing perspective anymore because there's clearly a place to get it. It just now becomes a decision of is your idea good enough and is Canton the right place to deploy it, and is it worth the investment to do that?

Right. When you were building Cashin, how were you already thinking about the incentive alignment before the CIP required it?

Yeah. I think that what Cashin at its core, we're very interested in bringing new builders to the network in a way that enhances value for everybody. We're also very interested in building the products for the Canton Coin holders to make holding the governance token or the utility token of the network more productive. We're not building products for short term, few months. We're definitely thinking longer term. Our venture backers and our ecosystem partners are all on the same timeline with that. That's why I think just the opportunity of filling the gap between will this governance change create a blocker or an opportunity, and we took the latter.

That goes back to the prior answer where without a working, functioning, centralized sort of portal or marketplace to find these, you could have made plenty of arguments that compliance changes and governance changes like this would have been short-term blockers. The fact that we've seen traction and continued growth is just a pointer to success of what we've all done together.

Got it. For a Super Validator or a Featured App that has the lock, what does CASHIN actually unlock for them in terms of how they deploy the capital?

I think about this question from the alternative way you would have to get locks. If you needed to do these as a loan, and this is the uniqueness of how we've done a lock on the suppliers, no custody transfer delegation. Loans would be the other opportunity. You'd either have to find someone to give you an unsecured loan as a Featured App and send you Canton Coins for you to lock, or you would need collateral in the form of cash, stable coins, Bitcoin, something else to get a standard secured loan. Generally, the Featured App we said either have allocated their capital to growth, which is the right decision, or maybe they didn't have enough, or the risk decision on how much they were willing to tie up for a governance requirement is just very different.

We've removed that entire capital need from this, and it's turned it just into a monthly interest payment, right? That's on a relatively manageable level, and the speed at which they can get deals done is not a blocker. CASHIN onboards a user within the three days if their KYB passes, they sign all the documents. The fastest we've seen a new interest to a live deal is about an hour. We've really helped remove a lot of frictions on answering, how do I get this? The fact that they don't need collateral upfront is a huge unlock so they can use all their capital and look at their roadmap in a much more deterministic way on, I have number of months where I can deploy what I have into actually building this for success.

Got it. From a capital provider from our side, I think, again, one of the aspects about Canton, it's still relatively new network, been around for a couple of years. The opportunities and some of the elements around options market, lending market, those are all still evolving. As a holder of Canton Coin, the locking mechanism and what you've built as an application is a way for us to use our capital and earn yield while supporting the network growth. It kind of achieves what our mandate is to obviously generate value for shareholders, but also invest in the ecosystem and partner with institutions that are looking to build on the network. I think those are what I see as the true benefits associated with this from our, as a capital provider participant in the market.

We also help grow and support partnerships of those building onto the top of the network. I think as we'll look to wrap up here in a few minutes because I see a flurry of questions coming in. I think just a couple maybe last comments here. For an institution watching this today evaluating Canton, whether it's a validator or a Featured App or a capital provider, what does the existence of a liquid market forming around locking signal about the maturity of this network in your eyes?

It signals that there's enough participants that want to take longer term investment risks. SVs have an unlock vesting schedule of a year. FAs have 60 days. Most of these locks would be expected to stay on. In the event that they need to unlock or need to recall their deals, the fact that there's multiple participants willing to step in and take over with a open term commitment with a 60-day kind of end period tells me that this is not just one or two kind of groups doing this or counterparties looking at this, institutions doing this. We have a supplier network that is standing here saying, "I will support these locks for the Featured App for this duration." Whenever you have duration commitments, I think that's a maturity signal. It's a confidence signal. I think it's a very important distinction between on-call, basically, you can immediately withdraw these things.

If you saw Featured App kind of backing themselves, that would show you one side of the equation. The fact that you have CC holders who are not Featured App willing to do it on their behalf kind of shows a big coordination, a big collective vote. The direction is everybody who's coming should be thinking longer term, there's a big push for real products here.

I think the other part, I talked about some of the numbers, over 100 apps that are already locking in the inbounds of more continues to show the growth of the network as a whole. As they go through the process and the application process of becoming a Featured App, you're seeing the inbound request of those looking to acquire a Canton Coin to satisfy the locking requirement. That hasn't slowed down, which is another aspect that I think is important. While these make the hurdle rate a little bit harder as you're aligning the incentives for the long term, you haven't seen that kind of drop-off aspect of it, which again talks to the future, which obviously very bullish about what we're building here and how that will continue to evolve as we go through the quarters.

For that, I will wrap up our section here and then dive into some of the Q&A. Just give us a second here as we get these up. All right. First question, and some of these I think we might have already kind of answered, but CIP-105 and CIP-116 both tie long-term rewards to long-term commitment. How does that change who wants to be a Super Validator or a Featured App on Canton going forward? Again, I think that is the alignment of the long-term commitment, and you're seeing that aspect of people still raising their hand, still seeing the promise of what's being built on top of Canton and still want to participate in that. It does align for those. The quality of them, they have to have skin in the game associated with it.

I think it filters through some of the quality of those that are wanting to build, they're also having the skin in the game. I think that is a beneficial outcome for the network as a whole. Next question. CNTN is positioned in locking as a service. How does the firm benefit as more Super Validators and Featured Apps look for ways to manage these lock-up requirements? As I mentioned, we've facilitated a number of these transactions and kind of have a cornerstone business around providing that service to institutions looking to do that, and we can be flexible on what their objectives are and how we achieve that, whether that's strictly just charging a fixed rate associated with that, whether that's a reward share or an equity investment in these applications that are looking to build.

We have a bespoke ability to work with these partnerships and try to satisfy their needs around it, and we have a number of deals that we've done to date and look forward to continuing to grow. Each kind of institution has their own objectives of what they're trying to achieve, and we have the flexibility of being able to shape to try and meet those needs. All right, next question here. CIP-105 and CIP-116 are the most recent governance changes, governance in Canton keeps evolving. What else do you see coming, and how is CNTN positioned for it? That I would say, as I mentioned, these CIPs 105 and 116 were iterative governance.

I expect governance structure to continue to evolve as the network keeps growing and goes from kind of beginning stages to middle stage life growth to more maturation life cycle, and governance will move along with that. For CNTN, I think we're very well positioned because we participate in every aspect of it. From a member of the foundation board, participating in the governance structure of the network, helping drive some of the governance. We participate on both sides of the locking. We operate a Super Validator. We lock as a function of our Super Validator rewards, and we also use our Canton Coin to provide Canton Coin for locking of those institutions that need to do so. We are well positioned across all of those different aspects. I think an element of our commitment to the network, this is our business.

This is what our operating company is investing in that ecosystem. We are well positioned to help support the network as we go through. Next question is, we need to understand how these transactions bring value for Canton Coin holders, and how these players doing things on Canton will expand their presence. Also in DTC, why these things will happen on Canton and not DTC other options. I'll start on the last bit, and by the way, anyone else feel free to chime in on these questions. DTC, the pilot transaction was not, and we've said this from the very beginning, it wasn't an exclusive aspect to Canton. The pilot transaction, regardless of what others say, you can just go to the DTC press release, which clearly articulates there were two chains that were part of the pilot transactions.

That doesn't mean that there can't be more in the future. There were two that were participating in the pilot transaction. Bazoo, which is DTC's private internal chain, and Canton, the public chain. The series of transactions were done across those two chains only and covered a wide variety, as I highlighted before, transaction types, asset classes, et cetera. I think it underscores what a public chain is capable of doing, and also some of the elements of what a private chain is. I don't think the standards that DTC sets for what chains it accepts will be filtered down. They are a very financially important market utility for the U.S. markets, and those standards won't be diminished by it.

You have to meet those standards, and the one thing that we've heard from regulated finance is that you need to have that configurable privacy, and that's why we're very bullish about Canton, and that's probably one of the reasons why Canton was chosen for the initial pilot. As far as what's the transactions and value they bring, the one that I'm most excited about is the collateral mobility aspect. Some of those transactions were a clearing member posting margin to the exchange. I think the exchange that was used in the pilot transactions was CME, as an example.

The unlock of what that value is from a participant who has to post margin to an exchange and counterparties, et cetera, being able to do that in its tokenized form, with the DTC pilot is great to be able to pay same day and in atomic settlement, but it's even more of an unlock of financing cost when you're able to receive that excess back same day in non-cash form. You're able to earn interest rate. If you own a U.S. Treasury and you want to use non-cash collateral to fund your business or use as margin calls, being able to use a tokenized Treasury, earn that rate, but also be able to receive that excess. As a liquidity risk manager, that's true benefit. That cycle takes multiple days in our current infrastructure.

That's one of the ones that I think is really powerful and really underscores what the possibility is to do with some of these tokenized efforts. Anything to add, Fern? Anna, do you have anything to add on any of these, or just keep chiming away?

I think that's great. We do have a few more to get through, so let's move on to the next one. Mark, I can ask it to you.

Sure. The next question is, based on the new platforms coming through CASHIN, what pattern do you see about who is building on Canton now?

Maybe Luke, you can start with this one, and then we can fill in as well.

Sure. Yeah, I've seen a few different patterns. I'll try to talk about what I think the impact is. Treasury management of some kind. These are yield strategies. Some of them take the form of vaults or DeFi. Some of them take the form of more traditional asset manager structures like separate managed accounts. I think the impact here is create a venue, a productive yield source to attract both other assets and stable coins. Without those venues and the ability to deploy capital, the proposition to bring stable coins over is a lot lower. That's one big group. RWAs is certainly a very big category, but within it, there are a number of groups working on tokenized equities and related markets to that. Perp futures on tokenized equities, securities lending.

There's a really big early conversation with the very big security lending firm in TradFi that is looking at Canton. That's just kind of bringing similar to the way that the Treasuries and the repo are done with DTCC, like looking at the next asset class down the line and all of the specifics related to that. The other one would be different types of lending markets. There's a lot of variety you can do of lending on-chain and Canton specifically. There are a few different implementations from pooled versions of lending markets, collateralized lending markets, similar to a lot of the other kind of blockchain styles there are, all the way down to full qualified custody of assets with legal recourse, backed by whether collateralized or uncollateralized.

I think Canton opens the door because of its participant set to uncollateralized or under-collateralized loans where credit risk is involved because you have participants who are very versed in analyzing that type of risk and potentially the risk tolerance there is different, and you can have legal enforceable agreements. You can't do under-collateralized loans in DeFi without legally enforceable agreements. Canton unlocks that ability in a big way. I think that's kind of the three biggest buckets that I see, which is good because it's all liquidity increasing on just a matter of what asset class they focus on.

I think it just underscores the utility element of where it's providing value of the financing cost savings associated with the workflow. Whether you call it treasury management or the like, those are the applications and the lending marketplaces and more ways to get yield on those assets that I think those applications are kind of focused on. What's the next question here? Where do we want to go?

There's a question in here kind of followed up on what we were just talking about, which is: for use cases like repo and collateral management, where does Canton provide indispensable value rather than simply acting as another settlement rail? What's preventing these workflows from reaching sustained institutional scale? Why specifically Canton, I think is the root of the question here.

Yeah. That's the configurable privacy cornerstone element associated with Canton. That's the kind of cornerstone element. Institutions require that, regulated markets require that, and you're seeing that across the institutions wanting to build on top of the network. I think that's the takeaway for that question. Next one is Can't have any Q&A without something on Clarity Act. Let's go to how might the passage or failure to pass the Clarity Act impact Canton Network activity? I'll start giving my view on that. I view the Clarity Act would obviously be bullish for the market as a whole and kind of blockchain and crypto as a whole, but I don't think it impacts anything to do with the Canton Network and what we're building here.

It obviously gives a more bullish sentiment to the market, whereas right now, obviously it's pretty negative sentiment across the blockchain and crypto. That's why it's even that much more important about what Canton's building isn't kind of a momentum trade or anything about that. It's really the underlying pinning of our settlement rails of financial markets and the value that it brings. I don't view the Clarity Act has anything to really impact what Canton's building. Obviously it does affect the more macro backdrop associated with it.

Yeah, I agree with that. If you think about any kind of bill or law change, just the implicit passing of it's hard to not use the word clarity, but gives any institution that's looking to deploy capital or plan their future, where they're going to use it, what they're going to do, you need that information to be done before you can act. People are not in the business of speculating on legal changes, whatever the result is, either direction, I think it removes this uncertainty loop that we might be stuck in right now. Over any amount of time, it generally tends to be a more positive and capital deployment comes out of it.

I'm going to answer, it looks like there's several different questions on, I'll say kind of price action or different things like that. We can't comment on specific price actions or movements associated with that. Obviously markets will dictate some of that. Market's interpretation of different things. One question on with potential yield earnings on CNTN, will the CC price diverge or will both CNTN and CC benefit? Again, we're building businesses that generate enhanced return on Canton Coin. We have a large portion of Canton Coin. It's not a Digital Asset Treasury model where we just accumulate more Canton Coin. What CNTN does is it invests in the ecosystem. It gives an enhanced return on Canton Coin. If you want exposure to Canton Coin, you can buy the coin. You can also buy the ETF.

CNTN, what its thesis is the ability to generate an enhanced return on top of exposure to Canton Coin. It gives you that diversified view and investment in the ecosystem as a whole, as we are investing in firms and applications, et cetera, on the network. Specifics about what that dislocation or any type of numbers around that, we're a public company, and have to follow our reporting guidelines around those. I know there's several questions that kind of go into those things. Next question. Hannah, which one do you want to go to?

I'm reading a question, how do you expect the new CIP traffic-based reward models to impact Featured App rewards? How that will relate to the applications that drive a majority of the volume. This is actually kind of getting at CIP-104, which as I had mentioned in our overview, was a previously approved CIP from a different quarter that the network has been making progress to actual implementation. Within CIP-104, there is this change that moves towards traffic-based rewards. The more activity that you bring to the network, inherently you are going to receive more rewards. What I think is important here as well is also to call to mind, as we have these larger lockups for Featured App, if you are an issuer, the applications that are going to be bringing assets natively onto Canton will probably see a larger benefit.

I do think that that is going to be a trend over the next quarter and beyond, especially as marketplaces as a whole are going to improve across the amount of pairs that they offer and liquidity as a result. Apps with real usage, especially the ones that historically have driven volume, will likely see more benefit, but also issuers on the network will likely see more benefit as well.

Okay. I think we have maybe time for one more question. I'm just going to take. All right. DTC Nadine stated in an interview that institutions will need to be fully on chain by this October. Is the rollout adoption of DTC clients happening as we speak? The short answer is yes. I think, again, the pilot was the proof that these transactions cover a wide radius across asset classes, transactions type, and large number of institutions. The market is large, and so there's lots of work that still needs to be done between now and October for go live, and getting those institutions fully onboarded and set up for that infrastructure. That's the testing and everything that's been going on for the last beginning part of this year, since their announcement in no actual relief in December of last year.

Definitely that's happening now and will continue to happen as we approach October. For that. Go ahead, Hannah.

I was going to say, it's worth as well highlighting that many of the Super Validators on Canton have deliverables that they must have for them to unlock their Super Validator weight. A lot of the companies to date have committed to building infrastructure, operational rail settlement features, things that are going to be imperative for a traditional finance process to be moved fully on chain. A lot of the Super Validators met these milestones over this quarter and the last quarter. We'll continue to see different developments from the SV side as well as other players on the Canton Network that are all building towards this go live in October.

Great. I know we didn't get to all the questions. We will try and reach out, and either reach out to those that submitted or publish on our website. We will try to get to all these different questions. Appreciate the interaction from the group. Want to thank everyone for dialing in to our second webinar, Q2 Canton Network Ecosystem Update. Really look forward to Q3. Luke Farrell, thank you for being in the hot seat, guest of honor. Hannah, once again, thanks for going through the research report. Check out our website, cantonstrategic.com. You can read the research paper, and see what happened in Q2 and also insights of Q3. We will see you till next time.