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As we step into the new year, com. mindshare Via encryption was usefully rotated. Prediction markets, stablecoins and tradable digital currencies (RWAs) have emerged as the clear winners, while AI, modular currencies and memecoins are no longer in favour. One protocol that stood out this week concerns two of the three leading narratives, and it has quietly put up impressive metrics: the Canton Network.
Canton is a blockchain designed specifically for financial institutions, designed to enable secure, interoperable, and privacy-preserving transactions. Its token became convertible on November 10, and after an initial drawdown of more than 50%, it fully recovered. It’s now up 47.6% over the past month.
The amount of RWA activity on the network is already noticeable. As of Fourth quarter 2025Canton has processed $6 trillion in real assets and currently handles about $350 billion per day in US Treasury activity. Much of this traction comes from institutional partners such as Broadridge Financial Solutionsa global fintech leader in trading and settlement infrastructure. Broadridge’s Distributed Ledger Repo operates in Canton and processes more than 8 trillion dollars per month In repo transactions, using blockchain pathways to improve efficiency in one of the largest markets in global finance.
Momentum continued to build through deeper integrations. A partnership With Nasdaq it connects Canton with Nasdaq Calypso, enabling automated margin and collateral management and allowing institutions to move and reuse capital more efficiently across traditional and digital assets. More recently, DTCC, the central clearing and settlement backbone of US financial markets, Selected Canton supports RWA encoding. The initial offering will allow a subset of U.S. Treasury securities held in DTCC’s warehouse to be issued in Canton after SEC approval. Given that DTCC removes approx 10 trillion dollars of securities transactions every day, the ability to move settlement from T+2 to near real-time can dramatically improve efficiency and free up capital within existing market infrastructure.
Network usage is closely linked to the token. Canton’s Global Synchronizer coordinates transactions between institutions, paying predictable fees in CC that are burned as network activity increases. Over the past 20 days, the network has burned an average of 6.71 million tokens per day, equivalent to about $627,000 per day, with peaks between $750,000 and $850,000. For context, Solana averaged approx $670,700 at REV daily over the past seven days, yet it trades at an FDV about 16 times higher than Canton.
Usage metrics complete the picture. Since November, Canton has averaged around 28,500 daily active users and 678,300 daily transactions, putting it In line With networks like Monad on DAUs and Ton on number of transactions.
There’s still a lot to unpack in terms of architecture, validators, and long-term token design, but the early signs are hard to ignore. With exposure to narratives such as tokenization, stablecoins, and privacy, Canton is shaping up as one of the most interesting protocols to watch as we head into 2026.
TGE lighter
Lighter was dropped and LIT launched on December 30, closing the timeline in which traders were testing the squeeze via the Polymarket contract effectively acting as a TGE proxy. The odds briefly dropped to around 60% during the day before the launch began.
LIT supply is capped at 1 billion with 250 million in circulation at TGE, a 25% float on day one. The airdrop was funded by Seasons 1 and 2 points, with 12.5 million points converted to LIT, implying about 20 LIT per point in the main math. The ecosystem allocation splits are 50% (25% now, 25% later), 26% to the team, and 24% to investors. The team and investors sit behind a one-year cliff followed by a three-year linear maturity. Against this backdrop, pre-market points were repriced sharply after the TGE event, with point buyers down about 50% from peak levels that meant around $100 per point at the top.
The most interesting discussion is not the airdrop, but the protection of the token holder. Lighter leans directly into the equity mismatch critique, arguing that revenue from the underlying DEX and future on-chain products can be tracked in real-time and allocated between growth and buybacks depending on circumstances. It goes further by claiming that the value created by all products and services will accrue entirely to LIT holders, with the token issued directly from the US C-Corp, which will operate the protocol “at cost”. In directional terms, this is a stronger position than the monetization model of common separate labs, but it is not a hard guarantee: the “cost” is flexible (e.g., salaries of Uniswap Foundation employees).
In enterprises, the market values Lighter similarly to Hyperliquid. At $2.7B FDV and $700M in circulation, Lighter’s float is ~25.9%, almost identical to Hyperliquid’s ~25.4% ($24B FDV and $6.1B in circulation). More importantly, Lighter trades at a fee multiple that is already in Hyperliquid’s range: 26.6x FDV/annual fees (and 6.9x rolling fees/annual) versus Hyperliquid at 29.9x (and 7.6x). This is despite the huge gap in absolute volume: Lighter printed $8.5 million in 30D fees versus Hyperliquid’s $66.8 million, and Lighter’s open interest is $1.45 billion versus Hyperliquid’s $7.44 billion.
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