Shaul Kfir: AllFi, Fair-Launch CC, and Why Banks Need Canton | The Node

Summary

Shaul Kfir describes AllFi as bringing decentralized-finance tools to traditional financial assets and institutions. He expects DeFi mechanisms such as composable transactions and collateralized lending to reduce the intermediaries and friction involved in borrowing against assets across providers, currencies, and countries. He sees disintermediation as real and approaching, but not as eliminating banks, brokers, or institutions that provide custody, protection, or other services customers value.

A major use case is 24/7 institutional financing and repo settlement. Kfir says Canton can support loans against collateral on flexible terms, including short-term credit that may not be available through traditional systems at any hour. He argues that tokenized cash moving around the clock could improve institutional collateral efficiency and eventually lower costs passed on to consumers. Traditional repo transactions can involve several billion dollars and depend on systems such as Fedwire, which have operating hours.

Canton Tokenomics and CC

• The interviewer says Canton Coin (CC) has performed well since launch, particularly when measured against Bitcoin; no performance figures are supplied. The interviewer describes comparing digital assets with BTC as part of their research approach.
• Kfir says CC launched without venture-capital allocation or pre-mining. He presents its role as coordinating incentives across a decentralized network and rewarding reliable infrastructure, applications, and user acquisition.
• The fee model is intended to allocate only a small share to infrastructure, with the largest share going to application developers and another share to wallet developers. Developers are meant to compete over how rewards are distributed to users.
• Kfir cites Visa as an inspiration for ecosystem incentives. He says VisaNet retains approximately 0.2%–0.25% of the relevant user-paid fees, while much of the rest goes to participants such as merchant acquirers and issuers, some of whom pass rewards to customers.

Institutions, Governance, and Privacy

Kfir argues that regulated financial infrastructure and decentralized governance are not inherently at odds, noting that institutions such as DTCC and SWIFT originated as consortia. He says Canton aims to carry over crypto principles including transparency, permissionless access, and no information asymmetry between supervalidators and other network participants. In his account, a supervalidator such as Visa does not receive privileged visibility into transactions.

He says Daml remains Canton’s most secure way to interact with the network for the foreseeable future. Polyglot Canton is intended to let applications written in other languages and environments—especially Solidity/EVM, as well as environments associated with Java, Rust, and C++ developers—interact with Canton assets. Kfir describes a future possibility of composing a Solidity-based asset exchange with a Daml-based asset in one transaction.

There is a privacy trade-off: Kfir says standard EVM applications were not designed for Canton’s need-to-know privacy model. In his understanding, users within a given EVM instance would not have privacy from one another, while a Daml-based asset such as USDC could retain privacy on its side of a transaction. He qualifies that explanation as tentative and says he could be wrong about the EVM implementation details.

Scale and Development Priorities

• The interviewer cites a $30 trillion tokenized-assets target by 2030. Kfir says he does not know where that figure came from and that Canton does not have a unified network-wide view, though he expects very substantial growth.
• Kfir says the focus is on increasing bandwidth, improving the Byzantine fault-tolerant (BFT) layer in a future release, and making it easier to deploy and operate multiple synchronizers.
• Most transactions currently use a global synchronizer, but high-throughput operators such as Circle or Visa may prefer separate synchronizers optimized for their workloads. Canton is also working to unify mainnet tokenomics across private and global synchronizers.
• Kfir says he sees no regulatory barriers, describing Canton’s design goal as operating within existing regulatory frameworks. This is his view, not an independent assessment.

Timeline and Adoption

• 2014: Kfir says the company’s story began.
• 2020: Canton launched and began processing transactions.
• 2020–2023: Kfir says the system grew significantly.
• 2023: He says Canton began operating with trillions of dollars, announced its move toward a public network, and ran its testnet and operational exercises.
• 2024: The Global Synchronizer and Canton Coin launched, according to Kfir.

Kfir cites JPMorgan, DTCC, and Visa as institutions working on launching on or moving to Canton, and mentions crypto-native participants including Circle. He says some financing-related transactions are already occurring on the network, including lending against collateral and use of JPMD, described as a JPMorgan deposit token.

Finance-Related Assets, Sectors, and Instruments Mentioned

• Assets: Canton Coin (CC), Bitcoin (BTC), USDC, JPMorgan’s JPMD deposit token, tokenized stocks, commodities, European debt, and other real-world assets.
• Instruments and activities: Repo agreements, collateralized loans, lines of credit, tokenized cash, DEXs, AMMs, flash credits, and credit-card network fees and rewards.
• Organizations and systems: Visa, Mastercard, DTCC, SWIFT, Fedwire, JPMorgan, Circle, Canton, and the Global Synchronizer.

Frameworks, Recommendations, and Cautions

Canton Incentive-Design Approach Described by Kfir

• Reward reliable infrastructure and continued network operation.
• Direct the largest portion of fees or rewards toward application developers.
• Allocate a share to wallet developers who bring users to the network.
• Let application developers compete over how to distribute rewards among users.

Cautions

• EVM compatibility may not provide the same privacy as Daml; users within a single EVM instance may be able to see one another’s activity.
• The interviewer raised the $30 trillion-by-2030 figure, but Kfir said he did not know its source and that Canton has no unified view of that target.

Investment Advice and Disclaimer

No explicit “not financial advice” disclaimer or direct investment recommendation appears in the subtitles.

Presenters and Sources

Shaul Kfir (interviewee); The Node / The Node Network. The interviewer’s name is unclear in the subtitles, which refer to “Sean” and “Mike.”