Last week was one of the busiest Canton has had. Korea Blockchain Week brought the network’s leadership to Seoul and in front of the country’s biggest banks. A UK bank and Visa settled stablecoin payments over a weekend. On-chain activity broke new records, led by Temple crossing $1 billion in volume. Meanwhile, the network itself is preparing for one of its biggest upgrades, with a live vote to move MainNet to CantonBFT. Here is everything CantonNews covered from September 28 to October 4, with each update explained in one paragraph. The week at a glance $1 billion in cumulative volume on Temple, days after a $30 million day 908,000 parties have now transacted on Canton, up from 20,000 a year ago $300 million in total volume on Cantex, up $100 million since August Under an hour for Lloyds’ stablecoin payments to reach Visa, weekends included October 10 is the proposed date for MainNet’s move to CantonBFT 8 apps cleared for Featured App status, and 5 venues gained DvP recognition Institutions: banks, exchanges and DTCC Lloyds and Visa settle stablecoin payments over the weekend. Lloyds Banking Group and Visa completed a seven-day pilot covering $750,000 in payment obligations, with funds reaching Visa in under an hour, weekends included. Lloyds bought USDC through UK-regulated exchange Archax, booked the settlements through its Jersey branch and ran its own Canton node using the network’s privacy controls, while Visa settled on a separate public blockchain. For bank treasury teams used to cross-border settlement taking a day or longer, moving money outside banking hours is the headline. Société Générale puts tokenized collateral into production. Canton’s Tokenomics group approved completion of Société Générale’s first CIP-0115 milestone. It confirms that the bank’s Prime Services & Clearing business accepts eligible Canton assets as collateral and has completed at least one production transaction of $10 million or more. That gives tokenized assets a real job inside an existing institutional service, beyond simply being issued or held on a ledger. The program’s later milestones cover repo, adoption volumes and SG-FORGE stablecoins. LSEG and Marex move closer to Super Validator rewards. Both firms’ approved Super Validator programs reached on-chain implementation votes on MainNet. Marex’s vote , which closes on October 6, would raise the reward weight of host operator MPC-Holding-Inc from 35 to 45. LSEG’s , which closes on October 9, would take it to 55. Neither vote hands over rewards outright. They accrue to an unclaimed pool, and each firm must show it delivered its agreed milestones before Super Validators approve any release. DTCC’s tokenization service launches this month, and Canton builders are at the table. DTC holds more than $114 trillion in securities, and its tokenization service, which runs on both Canton and a private Hyperledger Besu network, reaches commercial launch in October. Our analysis looks at what even a small slice of that would mean on-chain, and why Canton’s fee burn depends on activity rather than headline value. Canton builders are getting involved too: Palladium Labs , the team behind Alpend, and Swap.monster both joined DTCC’s working group of more than 100 firms, and Obsidian joined the DTCC-chaired Canton Foundation Collateral Subcommittee. Korea Blockchain Week: Canton goes to Seoul Shinhan’s CEO takes the Canton relationship group-wide. Shinhan Financial Group Chairman and CEO Jin Ok-dong hosted Digital Asset CEO Yuval Rooz and Canton Foundation President Viv Diwakar at the group’s Seoul headquarters. The talks covered linking Shinhan Bank’s payment and settlement rails with Shinhan Securities’ tokenized-asset distribution and Shinhan Asset Management’s real-world asset business, and opening Korean financial products to global investors. It caps a busy 2026 for Shinhan: a governance MOU in June, investments in Digital Asset’s $365 million round in July, and Shinhan Asset Management becoming Canton’s first Korean Super Validator in September. Korea’s biggest financial names gather around Canton. The Canton Foundation and Noves co-hosted The Capital Forum with IBM and Tiger Research, Canton’s first institutional forum in Korea . Shinhan Asset Management, Mirae Asset Securities, KB Securities, Franklin Templeton and Fidelity were in the room, preparing for Korea’s token-securities framework, which takes effect on February 4, 2027. Zenith separately hosted Seoul Table , a lunch attended by Woori Bank, Mirae Asset, Kyobo Life, Meritz Securities and others. No new deals were announced, but the turnout shows how seriously Korean institutions are preparing. Noves is now taking the roadshow to Tokyo . The message from Seoul: markets, not chains. In his Korea Blockchain Week keynote and again at the STO Summit at the Korea Exchange , Viv Diwakar argued that tokenized assets only become useful once they can be traded, swapped for cash or posted as collateral across connected systems. His example was a Seoul-issued money market fund whose holder obtains dollars from a counterparty on another network on a Saturday morning, with the asset and payment settling together or not at all. Yuval Rooz made a similar case at EastPoint and RealFi X Asia : measure progress by how much tokenized assets actually move and get used, not by how much has been tokenized. Network and governance MainNet’s move to CantonBFT gets a proposed date. Super Validators are voting on migrating the Global Synchronizer to CantonBFT , with the switch proposed for October 10 at 13:00 UTC on protocol version 35. The Global Synchronizer is the shared infrastructure that coordinates activity across Canton applications. The vote had six in favour and none against when we checked, and closes just before 11:00 UTC on October 8. In the same week, Splice 0.8.1 was cleared for MainNet once two-thirds of Super Validator nodes had upgraded, with 0.8.3 and 0.8.4 rolling out on TestNet and DevNet. 908,000 parties have now transacted on Canton. Data from The Tie shows the cumulative number of distinct parties that have made a transaction on Canton rising from 20,000 a year ago to 908,000, more than 45 times higher. A party is an on-chain identity rather than a verified individual, and the figure counts everyone who has ever transacted rather than daily users. Even so, it shows how quickly participation has grown over the past twelve months. The validator set keeps growing, with Mirae Asset among the newcomers. Mirae Asset Securities, Ankr Labs and Rome Protocol were among 60 organisations approved as Canton validator operators in the September 30 batch. A separate MainNet allocation notice named 43 organisations, including Upflam, CCTools, BTCS and Kustodia. Approval and allocation are separate steps, and each operator still has to bring its node online, with capacity set at 50 validators a week. A draft proposal would also record each Super Validator reward-right holder and their weight directly on the ledger, making the split visible in Scan. Eight apps clear Featured App review, and five venues earn DvP recognition. Meridiant, Rocky Wallet, Jubilee, Selay Wallet, Wintip, SyncVotes, Nocturnal Wallet and BETH cleared Tokenomics review for Featured App status. Each now goes to a separate on-chain Super Validator vote before its status becomes active. For SyncVotes, the decision came days after it renewed its application following its v2 rebuild. Console, Cantex, OneSwap , Tradecraft and C8 also received delivery-versus-payment recognition. When Canton rewards are calculated, their qualifying trades, where both sides settle together, now count as DvP. A new wave of applications, from fine art to remittances. CanTra is seeking Featured App status ahead of a digital security linked to Francis Bacon’s 1963 triptych Three Studies for Portrait of George Dyer , with a €100 minimum for eligible investors. Canal applied after a controlled MainNet pilot of iSOL, its SOL-backed asset, while ScopeX is building Rate Lock, which sends euros to bank accounts in India once a chosen exchange rate is hit. Cardiv and Slay Money applied for DvP recognition. Cardiv is a self-custodial order-book exchange, and Slay Money’s model locks a prediction-market stake into a dollar stablecoin as soon as the bet is placed. None of these requests has been approved yet. Development Fund proposals target payments, vaults and privacy. Three requests reached the Canton Development Fund. Cayvox Labs resubmitted Payvol , a 1.9 million CC plan for a shared payment-request standard that would let any app ask any compatible wallet for payment by QR code, link or invoice. Mystic Finance proposed a shared vault standard , so wallets could support vaults without a custom integration for each one. Primus Labs and HashCloak asked for 1,303,500 CC to let Canton apps check facts drawn from private web data through proofs, without ever seeing the data. All three are still under review. Builders and developers Ethereum developers can now build on Canton. Zenith opened its EVM testnet to the public , letting Solidity developers deploy on Canton with MetaMask, Foundry, Hardhat and Remix, without rewriting code or using a bridge. Its external_call() primitive lets a single transaction combine Daml and EVM operations that either both succeed or both fail. It is scheduled for MainNet in the Canton 3.6 release in Q4 2026. Two days later, Kaiko deployed its Data On-Ramp oracle on Zenith , the first institutional-grade oracle there, bringing regulated pricing data to lending, collateral and perpetuals apps. New tools make Canton easier to build on and explore. Canton’s Q3 developer update added an AI assistant to the official documentation, a Developer Hub catalogue with AI search, Walnut’s dpm trace transaction inspector and Certora’s daml-analyzer. CC Space brought its AI-powered explorer to TestNet with alerts, analytics and an API. C7 launched a public directory where anyone can look