Announcing Zenith: Ethereum applications on Canton

Today, we announce the launch of Zenith, the protocol that brings Ethereum applications to Canton through a bytecode-compatible Ethereum execution environment, and soon expands to SolanaVM compatibility.

Zenith is the culmination of almost three years of research and development, and allows developers to deploy EVM applications that atomically interact with Canton while allowing enterprises to run their own programmable EVM environments aligned with Canton’s privacy, compliance, and institutional-grade standards.

Introduction

Zenith brings Ethereum applications to Canton, extending Canton Network with an EVM environment, followed by SVM soon after, and allowing application developers to tap into trillions of institutional dollar volume and earn Canton app rewards.

This enables entirely new financial applications that are natively interoperable with Canton subnets, while also ensuring that institutions retain privacy, regulatory compliance, and control. It provides financial institutions with extended programmability for their applications and composability with the largest DeFi ecosystems on-chain.

As an example, EVM applications built on Zenith are 100% Ethereum-compatible environments that allow developers to deploy unmodified Solidity applications, using familiar tooling, such as Hardhat, Foundry, or MetaMask.

On the other hand, Zenith allows Canton users to seamlessly interact with EVM applications: users can initiate EVM transactions directly on Canton, spanning both Canton and Zenith, with atomic transaction processing, and subsequent settlement and finality on Canton.

Why Canton matters

It is for a reason that Zenith is focusing on bringing global composability to Canton: Canton has already reached significant scale in production use cases. Applications on Canton processed $6T+ in on-chain assets, and the network has become a major venue for tokenized U.S. Treasury repo markets, with over $9T in monthly repo volume.

In addition, the recent announcements show that Canton Network is quietly becoming one of the primary rails for institutional digital assets, purpose-built for regulated markets.

• JPMorgan is deploying JPM Coin on Canton,
• DTCC is bringing tokenized U.S. Treasuries to Canton,
• Nasdaq is connecting Calypso to Canton Network to enhance institutional workflows for collateral mobility,
• BNY is bringing tokenised deposits for institutional clients on-chain with Canton,
• Lloyds Bank has issued tokenised deposits on Canton, and utilised them to purchase a Tokenised Gilt from Archax,
• Canton Industry Working Group, including Euroclear, LSEG, and other working group members, showcased expanded 24/7 global collateral mobility

Zenith: a Super Validator on Canton

Canton is the institutional blockchain ecosystem trusted by major banks, custodians, and market operators for its privacy, integrity, and regulatory-grade security. Building on this foundation and aligning with the vision of the Polyglot Canton Whitepaper, Zenith extends Canton with EVM- and SVM-compatible, composable infrastructure for enterprises and developers worldwide.

To ensure long-term alignment with Canton, Zenith has been formally approved as a Super Validator with a weight of 10, equal to that of DTCC and Nasdaq, in early November 2025. Super Validators are a core component of Canton’s Global Synchronizer, ordering, validating, and finalizing transactions across independently governed subnets, and form the foundation that allows Canton to support interoperable, privacy-preserving financial applications at scale.

As a Super Validator, Zenith works with leading market infrastructure providers to provide new utility and yield-generation opportunities across over $8 trillion in monthly transaction volume already processed on Canton.

Infrastructure built for institutional standards

Zenith provides high-performance, Ethereum-compatible execution environments that plug directly into Canton’s institutional ecosystem.

There are two ways for teams to build on Zenith:

• Zenith EVM: Developers can deploy EVM applications that atomically interact with Canton directly on Zenith EVM. Similarly, Zenith SVM will allow deploying native Solana apps that are composable with Canton.
• Zenith Stack: Enterprises can launch complex blockchain environments through Zenith Stack, just as easily as deploying a smart contract. The stack will support both EVM and SVM.

At Zenith, we operate the full infrastructure stack end-to-end, including sequencing and RPC endpoints, so institutions and developers can focus entirely on their product and application rather than infrastructure. With its pay-per-use cost structure, Zenith also eliminates fixed infrastructure overhead.

Zenith’s architecture is built for enterprise performance, supporting 100,000+ transactions per second and sub-second transaction confirmations, while remaining atomically composable with Canton. It can be tailored to meet any needs with configurable economics and fee models, native assets, or chain parameters.

Besides being interoperable with Canton, Zenith can also connect to other built-in applications, as well as external L1/L2s such as Ethereum, Solana, or Base.

Timelines and mainnet release

We have an internal test network with end-to-end implementation of the transaction flow between Canton and Zenith, and our current focus is on making this production-grade.

Zenith is expected to go live on Canton MainNet in Q2 2026, meeting the highest institutional standards for security, privacy, and compliance.

Market outlook for Zenith

Non-stablecoin RWAs alone are estimated to drive a market size of $4 to $30.1 trillion by 2030, according to conservative (McKinsey) versus more optimistic estimations (Standard Chartered).

We expect over 60% of this volume to be captured by Canton, totaling $2.4 to $18 trillion. Assuming Zenith captures 1% of this, the total value of RWAs on Zenith could reach $24 to $180 billion by 2030.

Based on early EVM and SVM pilot pipelines, Zenith is positioned to serve as a primary execution layer for programmable applications interacting with these assets.

“Canton has proven that institutional-grade blockchain infrastructure can operate at real scale. What has been missing is general-purpose programmability that integrates cleanly with that foundation. Zenith was built to close that gap, without compromising the principles that made Canton viable for regulated markets in the first place.” - Teemu Päivinen, CEO and co-founder of Zenith

Zenith: a new era for composable digital assets on Canton

By bringing Ethereum’s programmability to Canton’s privacy-preserving, regulated infrastructure, Zenith unlocks an entirely new design space for financial applications.

We are committed to working closely with enterprises, developers, and ecosystem partners to accelerate real utility and adoption across markets and use cases.

Whether you’re an enterprise exploring blockchain solutions, a developer building novel applications, or a Canton ecosystem contributor shaping the future of digital finance, we’d love to collaborate.

Contact us to explore how Zenith can support your applications.