Canton CEO Questions Overvaluation of Most Smart Contract Chains, Emphasizes Real Economic Activity

Canton CEO Rooz recently expressed his view that the current valuation of most smart contract blockchains is divorced from actual economic value. He believes that their value should be measured by core financial industry metrics such as transaction throughput, recurring revenue, and real institutional usage. He criticized the industry's widespread reliance on "Total Value Locked" (TVL) as a core metric, arguing that this data is severely limited in networks like Canton, which are geared towards institutions and emphasize privacy. Because Canton's transaction activity is not publicly available, traditional DeFi News dashboards cannot fully reflect its true usage scale, and this privacy design is key to attracting compliant institutions.

Rooz also pointed out that many blockchain projects copy Bitcoin's token issuance model, using inflation to incentivize validators, even if the network itself does not generate substantial economic activity. He believes that this mechanism is unsustainable and prone to creating bubbles. In the stablecoin space, he proposed a clear standard: only when more than 50% of stablecoin use cases are detached from cryptocurrency trading will it mean that true product-market fit has been achieved, and the current market has not yet reached this threshold.

As of press time, the price of Canton's native token CC is approximately $0.1538, with a total market capitalization of approximately $6 billion, up slightly by 2% year-to-date. Despite the modest market capitalization growth, Rooz emphasized that Canton's focus is not on short-term price fluctuations, but on building the underlying financial infrastructure serving banks, funds, and regulatory compliant institutions.