Institutional blockchain adoption is accelerating at a historic pace, with financial powerhouses like JPMorgan, DTCC, and Nasdaq leveraging networks that process trillions of dollars in transactions. However, a major bottleneck has persisted: Wall Street’s dominant institutional blockchain, Canton Network, has operated largely in isolation from the broader Web3 ecosystem. Building on Canton required developers to master specialized languages like Daml, cutting off hundreds of thousands of Ethereum developers and battle-tested decentralized applications from participating in institutional finance.
Zenith is solving this friction with the native Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), followed by SVM execution layer for Canton Network. By allowing developers to deploy unmodified Solidity smart contracts that interact atomically with Canton's privacy-enabled infrastructure, Zenith bridges the gap between open-source decentralized finance and regulated capital markets. In this executive Q&A, Teemu Päivinen, CEO and Co-Founder of Zenith, discusses how the platform unites these two ecosystems, the significance of atomic composability, and what this milestone means for the future of global tokenized finance.
Q: Canton Network has become the go-to institutional blockchain for major players like DTCC and Nasdaq, yet it remains largely separate from Ethereum. What fundamental problem does Zenith solve by bringing an EVM layer to Canton?
Teemu Päivinen: Canton solved the two hardest problems in institutional blockchain: privacy and compliance at real scale. It's why DTCC, Nasdaq, JPMorgan and dozens of other major institutions chose it, and why the network now settles more than $9 trillion a month. But Canton was built on Daml, a language born out of financial engineering, not out of the open-source developer culture that built the last decade of on-chain finance. Ethereum has that developer culture: tens of thousands of active builders, mature tooling, and over 10 years of battle-tested financial primitives such as lending markets, automated market makers, and structured yield, that took years to harden. Until Zenith, there was no way to bring that work onto Canton without abandoning it and starting over in Daml. Zenith removes that choice. Developers keep their Solidity, their tools, their audited code, and get native access to Canton's institutional rails. That's the fundamental problem we solve: we're not adding a new chain to the landscape; we're connecting two ecosystems that had been solving the same problems in isolation, under one venue.
Q: Developers building on Zenith can deploy unmodified Solidity smart contracts using familiar tools like Hardhat and MetaMask. How does this architecture achieve seamless atomic transactions with Canton's native infrastructure?
Teemu Päivinen: Zenith isn't a Layer 2 and it isn't a bridge. Both of those models settle value off the main chain and reconcile it later, which is exactly where the risk creeps in: latency windows, message-passing delays, the possibility that one leg of a transaction succeeds and the other doesn't. Zenith EVM is a Reth-based execution environment that extends Canton's own protocol. Every EVM transaction is processed through Canton's consensus and finalized on Canton directly. We built a primitive called external_call() that lets a Daml contract on Canton invoke a Solidity contract on Zenith from inside the same workflow, so a single transaction can carry both a Canton-native leg and an EVM leg, and either both settle or neither does. Developers don't have to think about any of that underneath. You point Hardhat or MetaMask at our RPC endpoint, deploy like you would anywhere else, and the atomicity is handled by the protocol, not by your application code.
Q: Financial institutions operate under strict regulatory, privacy, and compliance constraints. How does Zenith enable institutions in Canton to tap into DeFi liquidity and yield strategies without sacrificing these critical requirements?
Teemu Päivinen: Privacy and compliance were never things we were willing to compromise on, as they're the entire reason Canton exists. Institutions in Canton keep their privacy model exactly as it is: sub-transaction disclosure, need-to-know visibility, permissioned participation. What Zenith adds is choice. An institution can expose only the specific EVM surface it wants to, a lending pool, a collateral facility, a specific pair, while everything else about its book stays exactly as private as it was before Zenith existed. On the compliance side, we support familiar Ethereum token standards like ERC-3643 that enforce eligibility, transfer restrictions, and lifecycle rules directly at the asset layer, so those rules travel with the asset no matter which environment it touches. Institutions get access to Ethereum's DeFi liquidity and yield strategies without ever having to make an all-or-nothing bet on public exposure.
Q: Beyond providing an execution environment, Zenith operates as a Tier-1 Super Validator in Canton alongside major market participants. What role does this consensus authority play in the platform's security and long-term governance?
Teemu Päivinen: Being a Tier-1 Super Validator with maximum weight of 10, the same standing as DTCC, Nasdaq, and Visa, means we're not a vendor bolted onto Canton from the outside. We participate directly in consensus, we sit on governance bodies like the Ecosystem Fund and multiple Canton Foundation Committees, and we're accountable to the same standards every other Super Validator is held to. That matters for two reasons. First, is security: Zenith EVM's finality is Canton's finality, there's no separate trust assumption for developers to evaluate. Second is governance: as more institutions and networks look to bring EVM-compatible assets into Canton, we're at the table helping define what that looks like, not asking Canton to accommodate us after the fact. It's a very different posture than most infrastructure providers have with the networks they build on.
Q: With tokenized real-world assets, U.S. Treasuries, and tokenized deposits gaining rapid institutional traction, where do you see the greatest immediate opportunities for Ethereum developers entering the Canton ecosystem?
Teemu Päivinen: Collateral is the one I'd point developers to first. Institutions are sitting on trillions of dollars in tokenized treasuries, tokenized deposits, and other high-quality liquid assets that mostly sit idle because moving them into a programmable position has historically meant settlement risk. Zenith lets a tokenized treasury be locked as collateral and a lending or repo position updated in the same atomic transaction, removing that risk. Lending, collateral management, and structured yield protocols that already exist on Ethereum can deploy on Zenith largely as-is and immediately have a shot at that collateral base. Beyond that, we're seeing real demand around compliant token standards for tokenized funds and structured products, the kind of assets that need eligibility and transfer rules enforced at the token layer. Any developer who's already built one of those primitives on Ethereum has a head start most people don't realize yet.
Q: Looking ahead, how do you expect the convergence of Ethereum’s open developer ecosystem and Wall Street’s regulated blockchain rails to reshape global financial market infrastructure over the next few years?
Teemu Päivinen: I think the distinction between crypto rails and institutional rails stops making sense. For a long time DeFi and traditional finance built in parallel: DeFi solved composability and open access, institutional infrastructure like Canton solved privacy and compliance, but neither could use what the other built. Once those two things can settle on the same infrastructure atomically, the market stops caring which side an application came from. We call that convergence Web 2.5, and I think it will be understood as an inflection point once the industry looks back on it, on the order of what electronic trading did to floor-based exchanges. Multi-VM support is part of that too. EVM is where we started, SVM is in active development, and general-purpose blockchains that try to be everything to everyone will lose out to infrastructure that's purpose-built for what institutions actually need. Canton is proving that thesis. Zenith is what lets the rest of the industry participate in it.
Zenith’s launch marks a pivotal shift in institutional blockchain infrastructure by removing the technical divide between public Web developers and private capital markets. By enabling direct Solidity deployment and atomic composability on Canton Network, Zenith allows institutional assets to interact seamlessly with sophisticated lending, trading, and yield protocols.
As the tokenization of real-world assets continues to scale into trillions of dollars, interoperability and familiar developer tooling will define the next phase of market evolution. Zenith establishes the critical pipeline needed to power this transition, ensuring that Wall Street's institutional rails can fully harness the innovation and liquidity of the global Ethereum ecosystem.
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