Cancore, a cross-chain trading platform built on the Canton network, has raised $7.2 million in seed funding through agreements tied to its planned CNRX token, giving the company a $60 million fully diluted token valuation before the asset has launched.
Paper Ventures, dao5, ArkStream Capital, X Ventures, MH Ventures and Proof of Talk participated in the round. Paper Ventures and dao5 received the largest allocations, according to Cancore co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Wasif Rashid. The financing had no formal lead investor.
The round provides fresh capital for Cancore’s effort to make assets on Canton tradable against tokens on public networks without requiring users to hand control of their assets to a centralized custodian. Cancore currently connects Canton with Ethereum, Arbitrum, BNB Chain, Robinhood Chain and Tron, while Base and Solana are planned additions. Rashid said the Solana integration will follow an external security audit.
Seed funding follows early trading activity
Rashid said conversations with prospective backers began in June, the raise formally opened in July, and it closed in mid-September. Cancore was founded in late 2025 and employs 10 people, with most of its workforce located in the United Arab Emirates and Pakistan.
The company has operated on Canton mainnet since April through two principal products: Cancore Trade, its trading interface, and Cancore Wallet, a self-custody wallet. Self-custody means users retain the private keys that control their assets rather than depositing them with the platform.
Cancore says it has processed more than $86 million in trading volume over more than 160,000 trades since its launch. Rashid said the platform generated more than $700,000 in revenue during that period. Those figures imply that Cancore has found early usage despite operating in a technically demanding corner of the market, where assets and liquidity are often divided across networks with different settlement systems.
Canton has drawn attention from financial-market participants because its network is designed to support privacy-aware institutional applications and tokenized financial assets. Cancore is trying to turn that infrastructure into a more accessible trading venue by connecting it to the liquidity available on public blockchains.
The company plans to use the new funding to expand its engineering, security, artificial intelligence infrastructure and institutional business-development teams. Rashid said Cancore also aims to bring more tokenized assets onto Canton, though he did not identify specific asset issuers or products.
Fees place liquidity providers at the center of the model
Cancore charges a 0.5% fee to each side of a trade, Rashid said, and adds a 10% markup to applicable Canton network fees. The platform also takes 20% of profits generated by its liquidity pools, leaving 80% for liquidity providers.
That revenue structure gives the platform an incentive to attract liquidity across every connected chain, rather than merely add network integrations. Cross-chain trading venues can offer broad asset access, but thin liquidity can make trades costly or difficult to execute. Cancore’s pool-revenue split is designed to reward users who supply assets needed to support trades.
Rashid said transactions are structured so that both sides settle or both parties receive refunds. This approach, commonly called atomic settlement or an atomic swap structure, is intended to avoid a situation where an asset is transferred on one chain but the corresponding transfer fails elsewhere.
Cancore’s system can use wrapped tokens or separate bridge validators depending on the route, Rashid said. Wrapped tokens are blockchain representations of assets that originate on another network, while bridge validators are entities that verify cross-chain transfers. Both approaches carry operational and security trade-offs, placing the reliability of the settlement process at the center of the platform’s proposition.
Rashid identified LayerZero, Wormhole, Squid and decentralized exchanges built on Canton as competitors. The comparison places Cancore between messaging and bridge protocols, which provide the infrastructure for moving information or assets between chains, and trading platforms that provide liquidity and execution.
CNRX launch remains unscheduled
Cancore plans to launch CNRX but has not set a timeline. The seed financing was completed through simple agreements for future tokens, or SAFTs, which give purchasers a contractual right to receive tokens under agreed conditions once they are issued.
Rashid said CNRX staking would be linked to lower trading fees and higher usage limits for both trading functions and the platform’s planned AI tools. Liquidity providers would also receive token-related benefits. The company has not disclosed further token economics, including supply, unlock schedules or distribution details.
Cancore also operates a Canton validator and has locked 5 million CC tokens under Canton Improvement Proposal 0116, or CIP-0116, Rashid said. Running a validator gives the company a direct operational role in the network it is building on, while the token lock aligns it with Canton’s validator framework.
Rashid previously co-founded BlockApex, a blockchain security firm. He said BlockApex completed more than 125 audits and helped secure more than $3.2 billion in assets. That security background is likely to be closely examined as Cancore expands into additional chains, particularly Solana, where the company has already made an external audit a condition for launch.
No additional financing terms beyond the total amount raised and the $60 million fully diluted valuation were disclosed.
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