Yuval Rooz has a direct message for the smart contract industry: if you claim to be the future of plumbing in global finance, you’d better show the cash flow.
“People have assigned a lot of value to these networks based on what they say they’re going to be,” said Rooz, CEO of Digital Asset and co-founder of Canton Network. “But when you look at how much they’re actually doing business, there’s a massive disconnect.”
Canton Network is a privacy-enabled blockchain infrastructure that aims to connect financial institutions and their tokenized assets across interoperable, trusted applications.
“The issue is not about any single chain. Many smart contract networks were designed for retail speculation and token trading, not for regulated, institutional financial workflows,” Rooz told CoinDesk in an interview.
“When you look at metrics like sustained financial flow, recurring revenue and active activity in the real world, 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 anti-crypto. He distinguished between assets like bitcoin which 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 presenting themselves as the next set of financial rails. If that’s the path, financial institutions should use them at scale.”
In his opinion, most are not.
“If you process very small amounts of value on your network, how does the market assign you a valuation of $10 or $11 billion?” he said, citing major chains that are seeing limited financial flow in the real world. “At the end of the day, it’s a memecoin. It doesn’t solve the problem it said it would solve.”
A speculative design flaw
Rooz argued that the gap stems in part from token design. Many networks copied bitcoin’s issuance model and minted tokens to reward validators, even though bitcoin is an asset secured by miners, not a programmable platform meant to host financial applications.
“Bitcoin is an asset class, not a platform,” he said. “People who secure the asset class get paid. Everyone copied that model for smart contract chains, and that was a mistake.”
On many networks, newly minted tokens flow primarily to validators, regardless of whether the chain generates meaningful economic activity. If consumption is thin, inflation dilutes holders while little value accrues back to the token.
In contrast, Rooz said Canton’s token is designed to reflect the dollar utility of the network itself. Each transaction burns tokens and there are no priority or front-running fees. If consumption grows in dollar terms, more tokens leave circulation.
“If you believe that the USD utility of the network will continue to increase, more tokens will go out of circulation and the price should increase,” he said.
Canton also has a “mint basket” with new tokens issued periodically. But these tokens are not just reserved for validators. They are distributed to users and applications that generate charges on the network.
“Compensating builders should be merit-based,” Rooz said. “Can you bring customers? 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 you do buybacks, the price goes up. That’s a much more compelling reason to hold a token,” he said.
In other words, value must flow.
Digital Asset, the company behind Canton, said in December that 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 fintech firm backed by BlackRock, Blackstone and JP Morgan.
Bloomberg recently began publishing data related to activity on Canton, and the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC), the industry-owned clearing and settlement market infrastructure, said in December that it had chosen the network as its tokenization partner, in a sign of growing institutional traction.
The limits of TVL
Rooz is equally skeptical of total value locked (TVL) as a headline metric.
“TVL is a very poor metric in isolation,” he said. “What matters is the use.”
Canton’s design emphasizes configurable privacy for institutional participants, and in return, much of the network activity is not publicly broadcast. It makes traditional DeFi-style dashboards incomplete.
Because transactions can remain confidential, “we trust participants to publish information about what they’re doing on the chain,” Rooz said.
Still, some data points emerge. Broadridge, a financial infrastructure provider, processes about $400 billion in repo transactions daily at Canton, according to Rooz. Other projects on the network handle comparable volumes, he said.
The network now generates between $2.5 million and $3 million in daily fees, Rooz said, with ambitions to double that.
“If a company had bylaws that said any profits it makes will be used to buy back shares, and performance continues to increase, the share price should increase,” Rooz said. “A decentralized network should be treated the same way. Look at revenue. Look at growth.”
An upcoming showdown
The broader market, he said, is starting to apply that lens.
“When the market is good, money flows into memes and speculative tokens,” Rooz said. “When the market turns, investors become much more demanding.”
Many altcoins that marketed themselves as smart contract platforms have been delisted during recent downturns, he noted. Meanwhile, tokens tied to monetized platforms have fared better.
For Rooz, this signals a shift toward what he calls a more “rational economic structure.”
“Crypto has defied the law of gravity for some time,” he said. “But eventually gravity wins.”
Stablecoins and product market fit
Even stablecoins, often hailed as crypto’s breakout use case, haven’t quite crossed the chasm in Rooz’s view.
“Stablecoins haven’t reached product-market fit yet,” he said. “You can say that stablecoins fit the product market when more than 50% of the usage is not crypto-related.”
Today, he argued, much of the stablecoin demand is driven by crypto trading and onchain speculation. Real-world payments and non-crypto financial applications remain a minority of activity.
Canton’s strategy is to push deeper into traditional finance and bring real-world assets and security to the chain. The network recently announced gold-related initiatives and plans additional non-crypto security integrations.
The goal is straightforward: move beyond crypto-native assets and into mainstream financial workflows.
“If smart contract chains are the next set of financial rails, then financial companies should use them for financial applications,” Rooz said. “Uptake, activity and use; value will follow.”
As for where Canton’s token price goes from here?
“If you’re chasing token price, you’re chasing the wrong thing. Focus on utility. Focus on building real financial infrastructure.”
The rest, he suggested, is gravity.
Canton coin (CC) was trading around $0.1538 at the time of publication. The token is up around 2% year-to-date, outperforming broader crypto markets. The token currently has a market cap of around $6 billion.
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