OpenZeppelin to Accelerate Secure Development for Institutions Building on Canton

The financial system is moving onchain. Tokenized assets, private credit, and regulated financial applications are leading the way, and the contracts and standards developers build on now will determine how robust that infrastructure becomes.

OpenZeppelin is bringing that foundation to the Canton Network: an audited, open-source development stack designed for how Canton works, backed by the same security rigor that has made OpenZeppelin the standard behind 9 of the top 10 stablecoins by market cap and over $35 trillion in value transferred through its contracts. The work is supported by a grant from the Canton Foundation development fund and developed in close collaboration with Digital Asset, the creator of Canton.

The Network Institutional Finance Is Converging On

DTCC, Broadridge, and Goldman Sachs are among the institutions active on Canton Network today. Over $330 billion in tokenized U.S. Treasuries move across the network daily, and financial institutions process around $9 trillion in tokenized value on Canton every month. For more than five years, the largest names in finance have issued and tokenized everything from bonds and mortgages to private equity and natural gas on the network, accounting for over half of all digital bond issuances to date.

Originally created by Digital Asset, with over a decade of experience working directly with institutional capital markets, Canton is a shared blockchain network purpose-built for regulated finance. Applications from different institutions can interact and settle with each other on shared infrastructure, while each party's transaction data remains visible only to the counterparties involved.

Institutions can bring their existing operational requirements onchain without compromise, and established blockchain teams have a network that meets the complexity their financial applications demand. For an ecosystem with the requirements of regulated finance at its core, the foundation developers build on needs to meet the same bar.

A Secure Development Stack, Built for How Canton Works

Securing applications on Canton is not a matter of porting what works on other networks. Daml changes the assumptions: every contract specifies which parties can see and act on it, and privacy is the default rather than something bolted on afterward. Primitives written for transparent, account-based chains do not map cleanly onto that model. OpenZeppelin's work on Canton starts from how the network actually behaves, rather than retrofitting patterns from elsewhere.

Over the next two years, OpenZeppelin will build out a full contracts library: audited implementations of Canton's core token and application standards, alongside the reusable building blocks institutional applications depend on, including vaults, role-based access control, timelocks, credential and claims systems for compliance checks, and a standardized gateway for cross-chain messaging. These are the components teams would otherwise write and review on their own, delivered instead as a shared, trusted foundation they can import with confidence.

Alongside the library, OpenZeppelin will deliver end-to-end reference implementations for the use cases institutions are already pursuing on Canton: a privacy-preserving exchange, compliance-aware lending, cross-chain stablecoin payments, and confidential token auctions. Each will ship as a complete blueprint, with working code, architecture documentation, a demo front-end, and a threat model, and each is designed for institutional composability from the start, with compliance hooks, credential-based access, and multi-party attestation built in. The same patterns will serve a crypto-native team and a regulated institution bringing tokenized assets onchain.

Every component is reviewed and security-tested before release, with thorough smart contract review, full-stack security assessments, and penetration testing, and every finding is published alongside the code. Throughout, OpenZeppelin works closely with Digital Asset, feeding improvements back into Canton's core tooling so the entire ecosystem benefits from a more secure path to production.

Securing the Next Era of Finance

The convergence of traditional and onchain finance is no longer a question of if, but of how it happens without unacceptable risk. As trillions in real-world assets move onto networks like Canton, the security of the contracts and infrastructure underneath them stops being a developer concern and becomes a systemic one.

That is the bar OpenZeppelin exists to meet. For a decade, OpenZeppelin has been the standard onchain finance is built on. Bringing that standard to Canton means the institutions issuing tokenized assets and moving regulated capital onchain can build on a foundation already proven where the stakes are highest, on the network purpose-built for where finance is going next.

The first components are already live. Start building on Canton today with OpenZeppelin's open-source Daml tooling:

• Daml linter: catches common mistakes and enforces safe coding patterns.
• Daml verifier: formally checks contract logic against its intended behavior.
• Property-based testing library: surfaces edge cases by testing contracts against thousands of generated scenarios.
• Token template: a reference for issuing tokens on Canton.
• Stablecoin template a reference for issuing stablecoins on Canton.

Together, these tools cover the full early loop of building on Canton: write, verify, test, and deploy on proven foundations.

To go deeper on the thinking behind them, read our research on why securing smart contracts for institutional finance on Canton is an entirely different problem.

This is just the start. The contracts library and first reference implementations land in the coming months, with more to follow. Follow OpenZeppelin and Canton to catch each release as it ships.