When the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC) announced in December 2025 that it would start tokenizing U.S. Treasury collateral on Digital Asset’s Canton Network, the institutional crypto world went into overdrive. Almost immediately, a narrative emerged: Canton was coming for XRP’s lunch. The debate got even louder after Canton completed its fourth round of on-chain repurchase transactions in late February 2026—this time an intraday, cross-border repo using tokenized U.K. Gilts with multiple currency legs executed atomically.
But here’s the thing—framing this as Canton versus XRP completely misses how capital markets actually function. The DTCC moves more than $2 quadrillion in notional value every year. Getting that kind of volume on-chain isn’t a one-tool job. You need a secure, privacy-first record-keeping layer that regulators can live with, and you need deep pools of neutral liquidity to bridge fiat currencies, CBDCs, and tokenized assets in real time. Canton handles the ledger and compliance side. XRP solves the liquidity and pre-funding headaches. They’re not fighting for the same seat at the table—they’re building different floors of the same house.
What Canton Actually Does
Canton Network launched in 2023 as what Digital Asset calls a “network of networks.” Think of it like this: every participant—whether that’s a custodian, asset manager, or exchange—runs its own private ledger using Daml, a smart-contract language built specifically for regulated finance. Canton synchronizes state changes across those ledgers only when a trade or collateral movement requires it, and only the parties involved see the details. Everyone else stays in the dark.
The February 2026 gilt repo pilot showed exactly why this architecture matters. Two institutions in different countries swapped tokenized sovereign debt for multi-currency cash with instant finality, all intraday, without broadcasting sensitive trade data to the wider network. The swap was atomic—meaning settlement risk vanished—and the permissioned design kept compliance teams and regulators comfortable.
But Canton’s strength is also its Achilles’ heel. A private network doesn’t magically generate global liquidity. You can tokenize assets and lock them into perfect ledger entries all day long, but value still has to show up at the right ledger, in the right currency, at the exact right moment. That’s the gap XRP was built to fill.
Why XRP Fits Into the Picture
The XRP Ledger wasn’t designed to compete with Canton—it was built to solve a problem the Basel Committee flagged back in 2011. Banks have trillions of dollars sitting idle in nostro and vostro accounts around the world, pre-funding cross-border payments because traditional rails are slow and expensive. XRP changes the equation. A bank can swap Singapore dollars for U.S. dollars via XRP in seconds, then unwind the position almost immediately. No need to park working capital in dozens of jurisdictions.
Institutional pilots over the past two years have shown that using XRP as a bridge currency can cut treasury costs by around 30 percent and compress settlement windows from days to minutes. In other words, XRP tackles the pre-funding and FX-spread pain points that tokenization projects like Canton were never meant to address.
When you layer them together, the system starts to make sense. Canton records ownership of a tokenized Treasury bill with full privacy and regulatory oversight. XRP sources the dollars, euros, or yen needed to buy or sell that bill in real time. Take away either piece and the stack falls apart—pristine settlement logic can’t move money that isn’t there, and all the liquidity in the world doesn’t help if regulators can’t see or control the ledger.
Convergence, Not Competition
The “replacement” narrative makes for good headlines, but the market is actually moving toward convergence. You need permissioned tokenization networks for compliance and atomic settlement. You also need public-yet-neutral liquidity rails for global capital mobility. DTCC’s Canton initiative fits perfectly into this two-layer model, and nothing about it pushes XRP off the board. If anything, as more assets move on-chain, demand for a frictionless bridge currency is only going to increase. XRP and similar assets aren’t getting replaced—they’re becoming essential infrastructure in Wall Street’s new digital plumbing.
