Zenith links Canton and Ethereum through atomic swaps

Zenith, the newly launched blockchain and execution layer specifically designed to integrate Ethereum-compatible environments into the Canton Network, said it has successfully completed atomic transactions between the Canton Network and the Zenith EVM, marking its "first technical milestone."

"The test verified that Ethereum-style smart contract execution can operate in coordination with Canton's institutional-grade infrastructure (processing $9T+ in monthly volume), enabling programmable applications to interact directly with regulated financial workflows,” the team wrote in an announcement. 

The Canton Network is a public, permissionless Layer 1 blockchain that integrates strong privacy and compliance features geared for institutional finance. The blockchain is supported by a consortium of major players, including Goldman Sachs, BNP Paribas, Deutsche Börse, CBOE, Microsoft, Moody's, and Deloitte, among others. 

Canton sometimes describes itself as "the first privacy-enabled open blockchain network," capable of connecting previously siloed financial systems while preserving data privacy and control.

However, Zenith argues Canton's theoretical interoperability and composability has been limited due to its reliance on its primary smart contract language, Digital Asset Modeling Language, better known as Daml. Both Daml and Canton were developed by the Goldman Sachs-backed Digital Asset.

Daml limits

"While powerful, Daml is unfamiliar to most blockchain developers," Zenith wrote. "This mismatch has limited the ability of the broader Web3 developer community to build applications that interact with Canton’s institutional financial infrastructure."

By providing a way for smart contracts written in Ethereum's native Solidity language to compose atomically, Zenith is hoping to foster "a new class of financial applications to run on Canton" and bring the tokenized deposits, treasuries, and institutional stablecoins issued on Canton deeper into the developed DeFi ecosystem. 

Zenith emerged from stealth in early March 2026, after some three years of development, with the aim of enabling developers versed with the Ethereum and Solana virtual machines the ability to build on Canton's institutional-grade rails without bridges or rewrites. The network was promoted to Tier-1 Super Validator status on the Canton Network, reportedly on par with DTCC.  

"Zenith's addition of atomically composable EVM, and planned SVM, execution expands Canton's capabilities in a way that can increase network utility," Digital Asset Head of Network Strategy Eric Saraniecki said at the time.

During the testing phase, Zenith said there were over 100,000 EVM transactions processed through its atomic swap setup, with latency typically between 400ms and 1.5 seconds. 

Polyglot Canton

Notably, Canton's developers are aware of Daml's bottleneck. In a recent white paper title "Polyglot Canton," the authors outline plans to integrate WebAssembly (Wasm), which in turn would open the door to other more common programming languages like Rust and Solidity, the language used across the Ethereum ecosystem. 

"Supporting additional languages following other proven paradigms would make Canton accessible to a wider pool of developers requiring less upfront education," the paper reads.

While no hard plans exist, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin has floated the idea of expanding Ethereum's range of programming languages as part of an ongoing effort to modernize the chain. The open-source RISC-V bytecode, which could one day replace the EVM execution layer, supports a wider range of languages including Solidity, Rust, and C.