Dear Investors,
May was a Decentralization Manager month. The product proposal we've been positioning over the last two quarters became a funded Canton Foundation program with a June launch date. Decentralization Manager — our line of business around decentralized party / governance infrastructure — is where the team's been concentrating its energy. The grant funds engineering for the first 14 months across three milestones, and conversations with adjacent grants are starting to compound. Everything else in the business kept moving in the background; the sections below break out the functional updates.
Decentralization Manager grant approved — ~8.5M CC across milestones; final milestone tied to v1 adoption by five companies. Digital Asset and confirmed v1 plugin adopters anchor the coalition.
Phase 1 launch locked for late June — HydraX (custody) and T-Rize (token management) confirmed as v1 plugin adopters.
Quantstamp audit kicked off — third-party audit of the core Decentralization Manager contract and both Daml plugins, covered by the grant.
CIP-116 provisioned — 30M CC staged into segregated party IDs to retain Featured App eligibility ahead of the June network deadline.
Digital Asset co-validation-as-a-service scoped — follow-on developer grant positioning Decentralization Manager as the Canton-native execution layer for a tier-1 institutional engagement (under NDA), BitSafe's largest commercial opportunity.
By the numbers: 1.07M incentive-program transactions and 545.76 CBTC ecosystem volume in the last 30 days; 4.70M CC distributed across Cantex, Temple, Kairo, OneSwap, RhoRelay, Tradecraft, Vala Wallet, Nightly, and Meteor; 215 open opportunities and 180 cumulative closed-won, rebalanced toward decentralization-tooling threads as legacy Vault Curator engagements were retired; CBTC live across 10+ wallets and 12+ DEXs.
Business Development
A growing Bitcoin asset on Canton needs two things moving in parallel: a way for institutions to mint CBTC, and places to trade and hold it. May moved both forward, and the cadence — 11 new CBTC rewards-partnership agreements in a single month — is the clearest signal yet that CBTC is becoming a default Bitcoin asset across the Canton ecosystem rather than a single-venue product. Decentralization Manager adoption is a separate strategic thread, tracked in the pipeline below.
The agreements that matter most for the story:
First anchor trading firm secured (Elk Capital Markets). Committed to providing continuous CBTC pricing on Canton's three largest exchanges. Closes a long-standing gap — holding CBTC was easy, but trading it at institutional size wasn't.
Conversations with G20 (institutional minter — native BTC → CBTC at scale). Agreement is in negotiation, not yet signed. A second prospective minter is in legal review. Each additional minter widens the on-ramp for serious holders.
Largest Canton exchange (Cantex) locked in. Confirmed revenue terms through year-end, securing the venue where most CBTC trading happens today.
Eight additional partners closed across exchanges, wallets, routing infrastructure, and developer-grant programs (Rho Labs, Kora Protocol, Squid Router, AngelHack, SatsTerminal / OneSwap, BitLeo, Epoch1, Nightly Wallet).
Three pipeline threads worth watching (counterparties still under NDA):
Tier-1 institutional engagement (un-named for now) — exploring scope via SOW. No commitment yet, but if the engagement lands at full scope it would establish Decentralization Manager as the standard execution layer for that class of counterparty. Updates as the scope solidifies.
Cross-chain Bitcoin partner preparing a Canton Foundation grant to bring another wrapped-Bitcoin asset onto Canton — contingent on building it with Decentralization Manager. This would be our first major external production adopter, arriving just as Decentralization Manager goes live.
Joint CBTC custody launch announcement with a signed institutional custody + wallet partner, planned for early June — the first time a major custodian and a major wallet will publicly stand up CBTC together.
Surrounding these: active conversations with several institutional trading firms, market makers, and large retail platforms; earlier-stage outreach across infrastructure, custody, and trading.
Product & Engineering
Integrations Live — 8 in May (highest monthly count this year)
Integrations include tracking and attribution, access to a dashboard, and API access being rolled out as well.
Kora Protocol × CBTC — production on Kora DEX
Temple & USDA — ~400K CC/24h rewards day after launch, large volume
OneSwap by CBTC — SatsTerminal's permissionless AMM on Canton
Vala Wallet by Finoa — CBTC custody live
CBTC on Alpend — live as collateral in Alpend's lending / private-credit market
Decentralization Manager — May's spine
Whitepaper live at blog.bitsafe.finance/p/meet-decparty-decentralization-tooling-for-canton — lead artifact in partnership conversations
HydraX and T-Rize confirmed as v1 plugin adopters
Inbound from a Canton Name Service team (draft CIP-209) requesting beta access to decentralize the registrar root — beta confirmed mid-June, full open-source by end of June
dec-party-manager0.1.0 to testnet; Quantstamp audit underway; modular governance plugins in final reviewCBTC migration onto the Decentralization Manager stack underway as part of M1 grant scope
Other engineering milestones
Canton 3.4 → 3.5 network transition — CBTC library migrations, no BitSafe-side incident,
CBTC partner-platform plumbing — partner-metrics API shipped (cleaner contract, smaller attack surface); per-transfer reward attribution fix (unblocks a signed institutional trading partner) in flight
Generalized Governance / attestor v2.5.0 heads to mainnet shortly; Gengov audit in flight
Canton Dev Fund proposal filed for an InfraDAO + The Graph index on Canton (a pattern already shipped on 20+ chains)
Marketing & PR
Spent May building the go-to-market strategy for the late-June Decentralization Manager launch. Because the release is open-source, the playbook is community- and developer-led: an awareness-first rollout that moves from a public testnet into a coordinated MainNet launch, anchored by a joint announcement with the Canton Foundation and Digital Asset. The month's work stood up the launch surface — a public waitlist, one-pager, demo, and documentation — with the Decentralization Manager whitepaper as the lead external artifact and primary asset in partnership conversations, and CBTC carried alongside as the live production proof.
Sharpened the company narrative. Refreshed BitSafe's core story from a dated "DeFi" frame to decentralizing on-chain finance — aligning with Canton's own "on-chain finance" positioning while staking out BitSafe as the team that makes it decentralized. The line now anchoring every story: Canton enables on-chain finance. BitSafe makes it decentralized. CBTC is the production proof. Decentralization Manager is how every other builder on Canton ships their own decentralized application. It feeds directly into the late-June launch messaging, with CBTC positioned as pristine collateral on Canton and Decentralization Manager as the open-source framework for governed applications.
AI-native partner comms unlock account-based marketing on Slack. Stood up an AI communications agent that drafts partner and ecosystem messages in BitSafe's brand voice, with human sign-off before anything goes out. Because most of the Canton ecosystem — and the relationships that drive it — lives on Slack, this turns Slack into a scalable account-based marketing channel: targeted, on-brand outreach to specific partners and accounts that previously didn't scale, with newsletter distribution coming next. A repeatable comms layer as partnership volume grows.
Co-marketing is now a repeatable partnership model. Every CBTC integration ships with a coordinated partner announcement rather than a direct retail campaign. May's flagship run was SatsTerminal × OneSwap — CBTC live on OneSwap's permissionless AMM — alongside reshare campaigns for new CBTC venues and integrations including Cancore (listing), Nightly Wallet, Alpend, and Raven Market. Active co-marketing threads are also open with Kora, Cantex, Ekiden, and Palladium.
Sustained editorial cadence. Published a steady run of thought-leadership through the month, building the educational base ahead of the Decentralization Manager launch. The three most likely to land with institutional readers: Inside cbtc-network: A Decentralized Party in Production, production proof of the decentralized-party thesis; How the CBTC Attestor Network Secures Institutional Bitcoin on Canton; and Decentralized Custody & Governance on Canton, which sets up the launch narrative directly. Rounding out the run: an explainer on Canton's three topology layers and a primer on why collateral management matters for institutional Bitcoin.
Earned media. BitSafe featured on the Canton Insiders podcast, amplified across LinkedIn and X.
How You Can Help
We are focused on expanding three areas: Decentralization Manager adopters, CBTC liquidity, and institutional distribution.
On Decentralization Manager, we welcome conversations with teams that need to operate financial parties with decentralized governance — wallets, custodians, exchanges, asset managers, and protocols building on Canton.
On CBTC, introductions to market makers, trading firms, institutional minters, and liquidity providers who can deepen CBTC markets are valuable. We are also looking to connect with asset managers and strategy teams interested in launching curator vaults on our stack.
If you can connect us to relevant counterparties, please reach out via Slack, email at [email protected].
Best,
Aki