Yuval Rooz has a strong message for the smart contract industry: if you claim to be the future plumber of global finance, you better show cash flow.
“People have placed a lot of value on these networks based on what they say they will be,” said Rooz, CEO of Digital Asset and co-founder of Canton Network. “But when you look at the amount of actual business they’re doing, there’s a huge disconnect.”
Canton Network is a privacy-enabled blockchain infrastructure that aims to connect financial institutions and their tokenized assets through permissioned and interoperable applications.
“The problem is not about a single chain. Many smart contract networks were designed for retail speculation and token trading, not regulated institutional financial workflows,” Rooz told CoinDesk in an interview.
“When looking at metrics like sustained financial performance, recurring revenue, and real-world asset activity, there is often a disconnect between valuation and actual financial use. Building infrastructure for global institutions requires a very different design philosophy around privacy, compliance, and interoperability,” he said.
Rooz, who previously worked at DRW and Citadel before founding Canton, said he is not against cryptocurrencies. He made a distinction between assets like bitcoin that the market values as a store of value or digital gold, and smart contract platforms that promise to transform financial infrastructure.
“Gold and silver have value because the market assigns it to them,” according to Rooz. “Bitcoin is an asset class. But smart contract networks are being presented as the next set of financial avenues. If that’s the argument, then financial institutions should use them at scale.”
In his opinion, the majority are not.
“If you’re processing very small amounts of value on your network, how does the market assign you a valuation of $10 or $11 billion?” he said, citing large-cap chains that see limited financial performance in the real world. “At the end of the day, it’s a memecoin. It’s not solving the problem it said it would solve.”
A speculative design error
Rooz argued that the gap is partly due to the design of the token. Many networks copied bitcoin’s issuance model, minting tokens to reward validators, even though bitcoin is an asset secured by miners, not a programmable platform intended to host financial applications.
“Bitcoin is an asset class, not a platform,” he said. “The people who underwrite the asset class get paid. Everyone copied that model for smart contract chains, and that was a mistake.”
On many networks, newly minted tokens primarily flow to validators, regardless of whether the chain is generating significant economic activity. If usage is low, inflation dilutes holders while little value accumulates in the token.
In contrast, Rooz said the Canton token is designed to reflect the dollar utility of the network itself. Each transaction burns tokens and there are no priority fees or upfront fees. If usage grows in dollar terms, more tokens go out of circulation.
“If you believe that the dollar network utility will continue to increase, more tokens will come out of circulation and the price should rise,” he said.
Canton also features a “mint curve,” with new tokens issued at regular intervals. But those tokens are not reserved only for validators. They are distributed to users and applications that generate fees on the network.
“Compensation for builders should be based on merit,” Rooz said. “Can you attract clients? Can you generate fees? That’s how you get paid.”
He pointed to Hyperliquid as an example of a model that resonates with investors: the trading platform generates revenue and uses it to buy back tokens. “When buybacks happen, the price goes up. That’s a much more compelling reason to own a token,” he said.
In other words, value must flow.
Digital Asset, the company behind Canton, said in December it had secured strategic investments from four major traditional financial players. Investors in the round included BNY, a financial services firm that oversees $57 trillion in client assets, exchange operator Nasdaq, financial intelligence firm S&P Global, and iCapital, a financial technology firm backed by BlackRock, Blackstone, and JP Morgan.
Bloomberg recently began publishing data related to activity in Canton, and the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC), the industry-owned clearing and settlement market infrastructure, said in December that it had selected the network as its tokenization partner, in a sign of growing institutional traction.
TVL limits
Rooz is equally skeptical of total value locked (TVL) as a primary metric.
“TVL is a very bad metric in isolation,” he said. “What matters is the use.”
Canton’s design emphasizes configurable privacy for institutional participants, while much of the network’s activity is not publicly broadcast. That makes traditional DeFi-style dashboards incomplete.
Because transactions can remain confidential, “we rely on participants to post information about what they are doing on-chain,” Rooz said.
Still, some data is emerging. Broadridge, a financial infrastructure provider, processes approximately $400 billion in repo transactions daily in Canton, according to Rooz. Other projects in the network handle comparable volumes, he said.
The network is now generating between $2.5 million and $3 million in daily fees, Rooz said, with ambitions to double that figure.
“If a company had bylaws that said any profit it makes will be used to buy back shares and the yield continues to increase, the share price should go up,” Rooz said. “A decentralized network should be treated the same. Look at the revenue. Look at the growth.”
A coming reckoning
The broader market, he said, is starting to apply that lens.
“When the market is doing well, money flows into memes and speculative tokens,” Rooz said. “When the market changes, investors become much more demanding.”
Many altcoins that were promoted as smart contract platforms have been wiped out during recent recessions, he noted. Meanwhile, tokens tied to revenue-generating platforms have fared better.
For Rooz, this signals a shift toward what he calls a “more rational economic structure.”
“Cryptocurrencies have defied the laws of gravity for some time,” he said. “But eventually gravity wins.”
Stablecoins and Product Market Adjustment
Even stablecoins, often hailed as the innovative use case for cryptocurrencies, have not completely crossed the chasm in Rooz’s opinion.
“Stablecoins have not yet adapted to the product market,” he said. “Stablecoins can be said to be product-market fit when more than 50% of their usage is not related to cryptocurrencies.”
Today, he argued, much of the demand for stablecoins is driven by cryptocurrency trading and on-chain speculation. Real-world payments and non-crypto financial applications remain a minority activity.
Canton’s strategy is to delve deeper into traditional finance, bringing real-world assets and collateral into the chain. The network recently announced gold-related initiatives and plans additional non-crypto collateral integrations.
The goal is simple: go beyond crypto-native assets and enter mainstream financial workflows.
“If smart contract chains are the next set of financial avenues, then financial companies should use them for financial applications,” Rooz said. “Adoption, activity and use; the value will follow.”
As for where Canton’s token price goes from here?
“If you’re chasing a token price, you’re chasing the wrong thing. Focus on utility. Focus on building real financial infrastructure.”
The rest, he suggested, is gravity.
The Canton Currency (CC) was trading around $0.1538 at the time of this publication. The token is up roughly 2% year-to-date, outperforming the broader crypto markets. The token currently has a market capitalization of approximately $6 billion.
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