Is Canton Permissionless? CEO Says Yes, but SuperValidators Need Approval

**Laura Shin** (0:02)
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Today's topic is Canton. Is it a real blockchain? Here to discuss are Yuval Rooz, co-founder and CEO at Digital Asset, Haseeb Qureshi, managing partner at Dragonfly, and Alex Gluchowski, co-founder and CEO of Matter Labs. Welcome Yuval, Haseeb and Alex.

**Yuval Rooz** (1:19)
Great to be here.

**Laura Shin** (1:20)
Thanks for having us.

**Alex Gluchowski** (1:21)
Excited to be here.

**Laura Shin** (1:23)
So we're going to start with Yuval. Yuval, I'm sure you're aware that you're probably going to be a little bit in the hot seat today.
But I actually think you're probably somewhat used to it by now judging from what I'm seeing on social media. So let's just set a baseline for the listeners. Why don't you maybe describe what problem you're trying to solve with Canton and how you structured it to solve that problem. Then we'll have Alex and Haseeb give the criticism that they want to have you answer to.

**Yuval Rooz** (1:55)
Sure. First of all, great to be here.
I don't know if I'm going to be in the hot seat. Maybe other hosts or participants will be in the hot seat. But we'll see.
I think that for me, when we entered the space, so my co-founder started Cumberland, which is a big OTC trading desk. We both came from DRW on the show. I can't remember who it was, said that this was founded by DRW. That's just not true. We left DRW to start this company. But nevertheless, our view was, we wanted to bring capital markets on chain. In order to do that, our view is that you need to be able to convince issuers to move their books and records to be natively on chain. In order to do that, you really need to solve the problem of how do you give a settlement finality, get an issuer to be comfortable if they don't want their books and records to be public for the whole world to see. There's a whole set of problems that you need to solve. And really, how do you do that on a permissionless set of infrastructure? So it's not to say every application or every asset has to be permissionless, but it's actually kind of similar to the internet. The internet is a permissionless piece of infrastructure. Yet if you build a website on the internet, you're not kind of mandated to make your website public permissionless for everyone to be able to access it or see the information that is stored on it. So for us, we're trying to make capital markets natively on chain, and there's a lot of features that had to be solved as a result of making that happen.

**Laura Shin** (3:35)
And actually, I just wanted to go back when you said that DRW didn't launch Digital Asset. I mean, so you used to work there. You left working there to start it. And then I believe Don Wilson, who is the founder of DRW, that he is also a co-founder of Digital Asset.
Is that correct?

**Yuval Rooz** (3:55)
Yeah, but DRW has no access to digital assets, GITs or anything like that. It's a separate company. It's an investor in our company, so DRW is an investor. They're not the largest investor. There are other investors. So again, both Eric and I, our third co-founder has nothing to do with DRW, and he shamed actually from the world of cryptography.
So it's just that me and Eric, my co-founder, started our... Well, Eric started his career. I actually started my career at Citadel and then moved to DRW, and we both left DRW to start this company.

**Laura Shin** (4:32)
Okay. And just to paint the picture for listeners, you have deals with DTCC.
JPM is going to do their deposit token on Canton.