The cryptocurrency market sell‑off is forcing a reckoning in the industry to reward blockchains with real business models, where value flows to token holders and users rather than intermediaries or speculative order flow, according to Yuval Rooz.
Rooz is the co-founder and CEO of Digital Asset, creator of the institutional‑grade, privacy‑enabled Canton Network. In an exclusive interview, he told Cointelegraph that he’s not worried about the state of the crypto market, and the turbulence hasn’t scared off his core customer base.
He pointed to Canton Network and derivatives exchange Hyperliquid as examples of what investors are gravitating toward.
Canton Network’s cryptocurrency rose 25% in the past month, while Hyperliquid (HYPE) surged 28%, according to CoinGecko.
“What people start to understand is that all of the crypto narratives have been empty shells,” said Rooz.
Bridges, fees and anonymity coins
Architecture and token design are the differentiators for institutions, Rooz claimed. For public chains, the architecture they rely on to connect to other networks is bridges.
“Bridges inherently are not interoperability,” he said.
Bridges move assets from one blockchain to another by locking them on their origin and releasing equivalent-value tokens on the destination network. As the assets remain locked in a contract, they are often targeted by hackers.
The growing reliance on bridges has also drawn regulatory scrutiny, not just because of their security vulnerabilities but for their role in obscuring transaction flows.
Related: Temple Digital Group launches 24/7 institutional trading built on Canton
Blockchain security company Elliptic estimated that at least $21.8 billion in illicit or high‑risk crypto flowed through decentralized exchanges, cross‑chain bridges and swap services in 2025.
Such infrastructure is increasingly viewed by regulators as a source of systemic risk, particularly when combined with privacy tools that limit traceability. Regulators have also grown more uncomfortable with what Rooz described as “anonymity coins.”
Rooz said that institutional clients like Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation and Euroclear need privacy, interoperability without bridges and predictable costs, arguing that general‑purpose public chains can’t offer all three.
Public chains hosting institutional products
Despite Rooz’s claims, several large asset managers are already issuing tokenized products on Ethereum (ETH) and other general‑purpose public networks.
BlackRock’s first tokenized fund, the USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund (BUIDL), launched on Ethereum in 2024 and has since been integrated with additional networks.
Franklin Templeton has likewise tokenized a US government money fund on the public Polygon and Stellar blockchains, with BENJI tokens representing beneficial interests in the fund.
Banks are also experimenting with public chain rails alongside permissioned stacks, rather than treating them as mutually exclusive, with JPMorgan deploying JPM Coin on Coinbase’s Base network for institutional clients in November 2025, and announcing plans to bring USD JPM Coin (JPMD) natively to the Canton Network in 2026.
“They’re bringing stablecoins to Canton and we’re very excited about it,” Rooz said, adding that clients were starting to take a view on stablecoins “kind of like collateral,” assessing which has more or less risk before deciding on their preferred payment method, from USDC (USDC) to Tether’s USDt (USDT), JPM Coin or other bank stablecoins.
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