Yuval Rooz, CEO of Digital Asset and co-founder of the Canton Network, said most smart contract blockchains are overvalued relative to the actual financial activity they process, arguing a valuation-to-usage disconnect has left large-cap chains functioning more like speculative assets than financial infrastructure.
Canton, by contrast, is now generating between $2.5 million and $3 million in daily fees, according to Rooz, with Broadridge processing approximately $400 billion in daily repo transactions on the network.
"If you're processing very small amounts of value on your network, how does the market assign you a $10 or $11 billion valuation?" Rooz said in an interview with CoinDesk. "At the end of the day, it's a memecoin."
What Rooz Said
Rooz drew a sharp line between assets like Bitcoin (BTC), which he said the market values as a store of value, and smart contract platforms that pitch themselves as the next generation of financial rails.
The latter group, he argued, should be evaluated by the same standards as any financial business: throughput, recurring revenue, and real-world institutional usage. Most fall short, he said.
He also challenged total value locked as a reliable headline metric. Because Canton is designed for institutional privacy, much of its network activity is not publicly broadcast - a tradeoff that makes traditional DeFi-style dashboards incomplete, but one Rooz said is necessary for regulated participants.
Rooz argued that Canton's token design avoids what he called a structural flaw common to many chains: copying Bitcoin's issuance model to compensate validators, regardless of whether the network generates economic activity.
Canton burns tokens with every transaction and distributes new issuance to fee-generating applications, not validators alone. He cited Hyperliquid as a comparable model: a platform that generates revenue and uses it to buy back tokens.
On stablecoins, Rooz set a specific bar: product-market fit exists only when more than 50% of stablecoin usage is unrelated to cryptocurrency trading. In his view, that threshold has not been crossed.
Read also: Tokenized Real-World Assets Crossed $25B, But Most Of That Capital Is Sitting Idle
Canton's Institutional Position
In December 2025, Digital Asset raised approximately $50 million in a strategic round from BNY, Nasdaq, S&P Global, and iCapital - following a $135 million round in June that included Goldman Sachs, BNP Paribas, DTCC, and **Citadel Securities. **
The network now counts over 600 institutions and claims more than $6 trillion in assets on-chain across bonds, equities, repos, and alternative funds.
Canton coin (CC) was trading around $0.1538 at the time of publication, with a market capitalization of approximately $6 billion - up roughly 2% year-to-date.
Read next: Alibaba's AI Agent Started Mining Crypto On Its Own - And No One Asked It To