Zenith

On our panel at @blockworksDAS Asia, Monad Co-Founder @keoneHD raised an important question to @wesearn_real about composability on @CantonNetwork: where does DeFi fit into the picture? It's worth asking, and I respect his grit to dive into these types of questions on stage. My answer: Ethereum has spent years building an ecosystem of lending markets, decentralized exchanges, liquidity pools, and applications that compose through shared EVM execution. Canton, meanwhile, brings together major financial institutions, tokenized assets, and workflows that can transact atomically across different participants without making sensitive financial information public. As @wesarn_real, Co-Founder of Digital Asset, explained on the panel, Canton was built to preserve atomic composability even when participants have different privacy requirements and validator sets. Where many privacy-focused blockchain approaches have struggled to preserve composability, Canton made it a fundamental part of its architecture. So the challenge isn't to make Canton composable for the first time. It's to add natively Ethereum-compatible execution without creating another settlement boundary. And to understand why that matters, we need to distinguish a few things the industry often groups together. "Cross-chain composability" usually describes one of three very different things. 1. Bridging: An asset is locked in one place and a representation of it is created somewhere else. The asset has moved, but what you now hold is a claim on a lockbox. If the lockbox fails, the claim is worthless. 2. Messaging: One chain sends a message, and another chain acts on it later. The two halves of the operation settle separately, on different schedules, under different finality rules. Most of the time this works but when it does not, one side of the trade has happened and the other has not. 3. Atomic composability: Every step of an operation, across every application and asset involved, happens in a single transaction. Either all of it succeeds, or none of it does. Traditional finance knows this as delivery versus payment (DvP), Ethereum developers know it as atomic smart contract execution. Only the third one is composability in the sense that matters for finance at scale: the ability to execute a single financial transaction across different environments without splitting its settlement. I get it. It's easy to get caught in marketing semantics, and who has time to granularly review the legitimacy of public claims, but the underlying implications of the actual technology are dramatic. Over the past decade, public blockchains and institutional blockchains both wanted to make financial assets programmable and easier to transact with, but each ran into a different limitation. Public chains kept composability, then fragmented it. Ethereum showed how lending protocols, exchanges, and liquidity pools became building blocks that other applications could use and combine. But its public transaction history and broadly visible contract state present challenges for institutions handling confidential positions, client data, and regulated assets. And, as activity expanded across L2s and independent networks, accessing liquidity and applications across different environments increasingly required bridges and messaging, introducing additional dependencies and security risks. The costs were real: Chainalysis estimated that around $2 billion was stolen from cross-chain bridges in 2022 alone, the majority of all crypto stolen that year. Private enterprise chains kept privacy giving up broader composability, and what we call DeFi. Financial institutions couldn't simply put sensitive customer positions and transaction details on a fully transparent ledger. Those networks could support their own internal workflows, but connecting assets and applications across different institutional systems remained difficult. There's a definitive reason we built Zenith and dialed into a GTM/PMF with @cantonnetwork. On Canton, parties with different privacy requirements and different validators can still transact atomically. A tokenized bond held privately by one institution can settle against a payment from another in the same transaction, without either side exposing its data to the other's validators. That is the point @digitalasset made on the panel, and it is a genuinely new capability. But it does not fully answer Monad's question. DeFi is not only assets but also applications: lending logic, liquidity pools, risk engines, liquidation mechanics. Almost all of that logic is written in Solidity, battle-tested over years, and maintained by the largest developer community in the industry. The obvious shortcut would be to bridge Canton assets out to wherever DeFi already lives. But that would bring back exactly the problems described above. The asset would leave the environment that gives it its legal and operational guarantees, and the transaction would lose its atomicity at the moment it matters most. So here's the PMF. Zenith has brought universal application composability to @cantonnetwork. It's not merely about asset composability... the stress-tested, DeFiLlama ranked protocols are critical to mobilizing the trillions in assets that are on @cantonnetwork's doorstep. This is what we saw needed to be built in early 2025. Zenith brings native EVM execution to Canton, so Solidity applications run inside Canton's transaction model rather than next to it. As I said on the panel, the idea is to "bring a little bit of Ethereum to the Canton side, and a bit of Canton to the Ethereum side as well." Thanks to @hosseeb for inspiring that line, and also unintentionally validating our thesis. Here is what that looks like in a single transaction: ➜ An institution holds tokenized Treasury fund shares on Canton. ➜ It moves those shares into Zenith EVM and deposits them as collateral in a lending protocol written in Solidity. The original shares are locked on Canton, and a fully backed representation is created on Zenith EVM. ➜ Canton applies the asset’s compliance rules: eligibility, transfer restrictions, and any other conditions the issuer has defined. ➜ The lending contract checks the collateral value and issues a stablecoin loan. ➜ Canton validators finalize the full operation. Either everything commits or nothing does. ➜ If any step fails, whether that's an eligibility check, a price check, or a contract error, nothing settles. That's what makes Zenith's approach different: rather than simply moving assets between environments, it allows Canton-native assets and EVM smart contracts to interact and settle atomically as part of the same transaction. Now imagine eligible tokenized Japanese Government Bonds (JGBs) on Canton being used to borrow stablecoins through an EVM lending application. This is actually in motion already. However, @keoneHD's question is the right one to keep asking, and the answer will be measured in deployments and volume, not in architecture diagrams. Native EVM execution on Canton does not create DeFi liquidity overnight. Protocols still need to deploy, liquidity needs to develop, and institutions must determine which assets can participate in which applications. What has changed is the starting point, and a door where there used not to be one. Before we built the Zenith Stack, connecting DeFi to institutional assets meant asking one side to give up what made it valuable: either the institution gave up its security guarantees for distribution on other chains, or the DeFi protocols gave up before rewriting their code to Daml. That trade-off no longer has to exist. The entire reason to be on-chain is composability, and the next step is making sure it does not stop at the edge of a chain. Watch the full DAS Asia discussion: nitter.cf/ZenithFdn/status/21081… Explore Zenith EVM Testnet: docs.zenith.network/ Zth.