Fairmint

Market infrastructure is shaped by the technology of its time. In 1969, Wall Street had a paperwork crisis. The industry chose the most robust path available then: centralized electronic rails. Today, distributed ledgers make a different trust model possible. At Fairmint, this is the part we care about: regulated actors syncing around an authoritative onchain ledger. The shift will not happen because onchain is fashionable. It will happen where the rails work better.

Is Canton misunderstood? I think the better question is whether the permissionless vs. permissioned debate is now out of date. Most finance today does not run on crypto ideology. It runs on AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and a lot of legacy infrastructure around them. If onchain finance keeps arguing L1 vs. L1, or L1 vs. L2, we end up fighting over the same small part of the market. The bigger ambition is to move the financial world onto better rails: programmable, privacy-aware, interoperable infrastructure that institutions can actually use. That is why Fairmint cares about Canton Network. Clip from my conversation with Bohdan Ivanov on Canton Insiders, the podcast from CatalyX by IntellectEU.

One of the earliest decisions we made at Fairmint to treat regulation as part of the product. Before we incorporated, before we had much of anything figured out, we started working with counsel. We knew we were building at the intersection of blockchain, private company equity, and US securities law, and we wanted to build with respect for that reality from day one. That choice shaped a lot. It forced us to be patient. It made us better students of the market. And it gave us a clearer view of what it takes to bring equity onchain in a way issuers and investors can trust. Innovation in private markets cannot just be clever. It has to be durable.

The institutional layer of this market will not be built in headlines. It gets built in rooms where serious operators can compare notes honestly. That was the point of last night’s Canton Select Private Gathering. Hosted by Fairmint and The RWA Desk, with support from Obsidian Systems LLC, we brought together senior leaders across capital markets, digital assets, and market infrastructure to talk about the institutional layer being built around the Canton Network. Strong turnout. High-signal conversations. Exactly the kind of room this market needs more of. Thank you to everyone who joined us, and to Obsidian Systems for supporting the evening.

Why do outdated ownership records and the equity transfer process create a market structure problem, not just an administrative one? In this clip, Chad Oda, our Head of Institutional Growth, interviews our CTO, Thibauld Favre, on one of the core bottlenecks in private markets. Companies stay private longer. More value is created before IPO, and more transactions happen in private markets. But the infrastructure to move ownership is still fragmented, manual, and expensive. That is why this is bigger than paperwork. If equity cannot move cleanly, the market itself stays inefficient. It is also why Fairmint has spent so much time focused on the cap table and the rails underneath it.