Why SHAFT is Exploring Canton Network

Two tectonic shifts in technology are unfolding, seemingly in separate universes. The first is the explosive rise of the "AI Agent Economy," where autonomous assistants are set to become our primary proxies for digital interaction. The second is a quieter, yet monumental, migration as traditional finance moves trillions of dollars in real-world assets onto the blockchain.

On the surface, these trends appear disconnected. But they are not on a collision course; they represent the necessary co-evolution of supply and demand for a new, autonomous machine-to-machine economy. This convergence is happening now because two critical inflection points have been reached simultaneously: agentic AI is just 18 months from dominating web traffic, and the decade-long privacy problem that kept Wall Street off-chain has finally been solved.

1. First, a Reality Check: AI Agents Are About to Reshape Web Traffic

The internet as we know it is on the verge of a paradigm shift. Analysts predict that by 2025, a staggering 40% of web traffic will be AI-driven. This means AI assistants like ChatGPT and Claude will increasingly act as our digital envoys, executing complex tasks and navigating the web on our behalf.

Yet, a massive roadblock exists. An estimated 70% of websites currently fail AI navigation tests because they lack the semantic HTML and ARIA labels that agents, like screen readers for the visually impaired, depend on to understand content. For an AI agent, navigating a website without these labels is like a human trying to read a book where all the spaces between words have been removed. The content is there, but it's functionally incomprehensible.

In this imminent reality, inaccessible websites will become "effectively invisible" to a dominant new source of economic activity. Digital accessibility is no longer a matter of compliance; it is a prerequisite for survival and a critical competitive advantage in the agent-driven economy.

2. Meanwhile, Wall Street Is Building Its Own Private Internet of Value

While AI agents prepare to remake the public web, the titans of finance are constructing their own digital rails. Systemically crucial institutions like the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC)—which processes quadrillions of dollars in transactions annually—and JPMorgan are moving core financial assets, such as U.S. Treasury securities and JPM Coin deposit tokens, onto the blockchain. Tokenizing U.S. Treasuries, in particular, is a crucial test of whether this technology can support the "most systemically important instruments in finance."

For over a decade, these institutions have been unable to use public blockchains like Ethereum, whose radical transparency is "misaligned with the requirements of regulated financial markets." Publicly exposing positions and counterparties is a non-starter. Early privacy solutions also fell short. Fully anonymous models like Monero make it impossible to fulfill KYC (Know Your Customer) and AML (Anti-Money Laundering) obligations, while the binary choice offered by Zcash—either full transparency or total privacy—lacks the nuance required for institutional workflows.

The solution they are rapidly converging on is the Canton Network, a "privacy-enabled, permissioned blockchain" purpose-built for regulated finance. Its key innovation is "selective privacy," which allows institutions to transact on a shared ledger while retaining granular control over data visibility. This mirrors how markets actually function, enabling firms to meet regulatory duties without exposing sensitive information to the entire network.

The network’s gravity is demonstrated by its participants, which include DTCC, J.P. Morgan, Goldman Sachs, BNP Paribas, Microsoft, and Franklin Templeton, which now has a tokenized fund with over $828 million in assets on Canton.

3. The Core Insight: Accessibility Is No Longer Just for Humans

The bridge connecting the AI agent economy and Wall Street's new on-chain world is a radical expansion of a familiar concept: accessibility. The very same technical standards that make a website navigable for a human using a screen reader—structured data, proper labels, and semantic HTML—are precisely what AI agents require to interpret and act upon digital information.

At the forefront of this new paradigm is the SHAFT Foundation, a network of DeFi experts, AI researchers, and engineers that actively funds and promotes innovative AI projects. Far more than a mere advocacy group, SHAFT is a strategic hub deliberately building the agentic tools for the future crypto economy. Its partnership with SpeechLab, an Andrew Ng's AI Fund portfolio company, focuses on advanced AI like speech-to-speech translation, demonstrating a clear vision for a digital world where AI agents are first-class citizens.

The SHAFT Foundation's philosophy is captured in their credo:

"As AI agents begin to power everything from productivity tools to financial services, those built with full accessibility and inclusion by design aren't just ethically aligned—they are more interoperable, more likely to be adopted, and more trusted in the emerging networks of AI agents that interact, evaluate, and select one another. In this new paradigm, accessibility isn't a feature—it's a network advantage."

This represents a profound shift. "Accessibility" is expanding from a human-centric concern into a fundamental requirement for the machine-to-machine interactions that will define the new economy.

4. The Inevitable Intersection: Where Canton's Assets Meet SHAFT's Agents

The estimated 10–30 trillion in tokenized assets being brought onto the Canton Network will not exist in a silo. They are being created to be accessed, analyzed, and managed by automated systems. The future of finance is one where a user asks their AI agent to rebalance a portfolio of tokenized assets.

For this to work, that agent must be able to seamlessly and accurately interact with the platforms and smart contracts built on Canton. If those institutional systems are not designed with machine accessibility, asking an AI agent to manage a tokenized portfolio would be like asking a trading algorithm to execute on a chart it cannot read—the data is present, but entirely unusable.

Here, the necessary co-evolution becomes clear: The SHAFT Foundation is seeding the ecosystem with the intelligent agents and accessibility standards required to navigate the digital world, while the Canton Network is forging the regulated, on-chain financial rails where those agents will operate.

The ultimate utility and success of Wall Street's on-chain future will be directly proportional to how accessible and interoperable its infrastructure is for the coming wave of AI agents.

A New Foundation for the Digital Economy

The parallel tracks of AI accessibility and institutional tokenization are not coincidental; they are the foundational pillars of a future where autonomous agents manage a global, on-chain financial system. The technical principles that ensure a website is usable by a person with a disability are the same ones that will enable an AI to manage a multi-trillion-dollar asset class.

This synthesis reveals the emerging architecture of our digital economy and leaves us with a critical question: As AI agents increasingly become our digital proxies, will the most valuable networks be the ones that are not only secure and private but also universally accessible to both humans and machines?