A tiny trading startup just raised $7.2 million to connect Canton's tokenized assets to the rest of crypto

A trading platform built on the Canton network has raised $7.2 million in seed funding, betting that tokenized financial assets will need dedicated plumbing to move between private-style networks and the public crypto world.

According to The Block, Cancore closed the round in mid-September after opening investor conversations in June and formally launching the raise in July. Paper Ventures, dao5, ArkStream Capital, X Ventures, MH Ventures and Proof of Talk backed the round, with no formal lead investor — though Paper Ventures and dao5 took the largest allocations, co-founder and chief executive Wasif Rashid told The Block.

A seed round priced in tokens

The round was raised at a $60 million fully diluted token valuation, according to Rashid, and funded entirely through simple agreements for future tokens — SAFTs — for Cancore's planned CNRX token. Investors therefore hold a contractual claim on tokens that do not yet exist, with the launch timeline still undisclosed.

What Cancore actually does

Cancore describes its platform as a "Liquidity OS for tokenized finance," The Block reported: putting assets on-chain is only half the job, since programmability lets them be traded, managed and settled automatically under preset rules.

The platform has been live on Canton mainnet since April, offering Cancore Trade for cross-network trading and Cancore Wallet, where users keep control of their own keys. Traders can move across Canton, Ethereum, Arbitrum, BNB Chain, Robinhood Chain and Tron, with Base and Solana planned — Solana only after an external security audit, Rashid said.

Since launch, Cancore has processed more than $86 million across over 160,000 trades, generating more than $700,000 in revenue, according to Rashid. It charges 0.5% on each side of a trade, adds 10% to Canton network fees, and takes 20% of profits from liquidity pools, with the remaining 80% going to liquidity providers.

The trust question at the centre

Cross-chain trading lives or dies on one promise: that a trade either completes on both chains or nobody loses money. Rashid told The Block that Cancore guarantees exactly that, and that users can trade without surrendering control of their assets.

That is a direct shot at the bridge model behind some of crypto's largest hacks, and it puts Cancore up against established names Rashid himself cited, including LayerZero, Wormhole and Squid. His claimed edge is bundling trading, settlement and AI automation in one place.

What comes next

Cancore plans to launch its CNRX token, though Rashid gave no timeline. Holders who stake it will get lower trading fees and higher limits, while liquidity providers will also receive token benefits, The Block reported. The company, founded in late 2025, has just 10 employees, mainly based in the UAE and Pakistan, and plans to hire across engineering, security, AI infrastructure and institutional business development.

For a ten-person team, the raise buys time to prove the harder claim: that tokenized finance needs a new kind of exchange, not just a new venue. The $86 million in volume so far is a start, not an answer.

Crypto prices are volatile and the figures above reflect the reporting of the cited sources at the time of publication.

Written by the BidAsk Newsroom. Based on reporting from the sources below.