Canton Foundation Supports Open Standards for Equity Ownership and Capitalization Data

Advancing interoperability, data portability, and collaboration across traditional and emerging financial infrastructure.

The Canton Foundation is pleased to announce its support for the Open Cap Table Coalition (OCT) and its mission to improve the interoperability, transparency, and portability of capitalization data.

Following a nomination by Fairmint, a Coalition member and the first SEC-registered transfer agent operating natively onchain on Canton, the Canton Foundation’s board approved joining the Coalition unanimously.

As financial markets continue to evolve, the ability to securely exchange, verify, and manage ownership information across systems is becoming increasingly important. Whether a company maintains its capitalization records through traditional equity management platforms or emerging digital infrastructure, it should retain control over its information and the freedom to choose the technologies that best serve its needs.

These principles are closely aligned with the Canton Foundation’s mission to support open, interoperable financial infrastructure.

Why Open Capitalization Standards Matter

Capitalization tables are foundational corporate records. They document ownership interests, equity issuances, transfers, and other changes to a company’s capital structure.

Yet this information often resides across different systems used by companies, law firms, investors, transfer agents, and service providers. Moving data between these systems can introduce unnecessary complexity, manual reconciliation, and operational risk.

Open standards help address these challenges by establishing consistent ways to represent and exchange information.

The Open Cap Table Coalition has brought together participants across the equity management ecosystem to advance this goal, including through the development of the Open Cap Table Format (OCF), an open-source standard designed to facilitate the exchange of capitalization data.

By supporting interoperability at the data level, these efforts can help organizations reduce dependence on individual technology providers while enabling more efficient collaboration across financial markets.

Supporting the Coalition’s Three Core Principles

The Canton Foundation supports the three principles at the heart of the Open Cap Table Coalition:

Responsibility

Companies are responsible for maintaining accurate capitalization records, while equity holders retain applicable rights to information concerning their holdings.

Clear accountability for corporate records is essential to maintaining trust in financial systems, regardless of the underlying technology.

Company Choice

Companies should have the freedom to use and transfer their capitalization information across the services and technologies they choose.

Interoperability should expand an organization’s options, not constrain them. Open standards can help prevent unnecessary vendor lock-in and support the ability to adopt new technologies as business needs evolve.

Collective Action

Service providers and technology platforms should collaborate to make capitalization data portable and interoperable.

Meaningful interoperability requires cooperation across the ecosystem. No single platform or infrastructure provider can establish a truly open financial system independently.

Connecting Traditional and Digital Financial Infrastructure

The Canton Network was designed to enable financial institutions and other market participants to transact across interoperable applications while preserving the privacy and control required by regulated markets.

These same considerations are relevant to the evolution of equity ownership records.

As financial assets increasingly interact with digital infrastructure, common data standards can help connect established systems with new applications and transaction workflows.

Importantly, open capitalization standards should remain technology-neutral. Their value comes from allowing participants to exchange information reliably across different platforms, whether those platforms rely on conventional databases, distributed ledger technology, or a combination of both.

The Canton Foundation believes that open standards, institutional-grade privacy, and interoperability are complementary foundations for the next generation of financial markets.

Looking Ahead

Supporting the Open Cap Table Coalition reflects our belief that companies and equity holders should have greater choice and control over their capitalization information. Common standards provide a practical foundation for making that information more portable across traditional and emerging financial infrastructure.

We look forward to working with Coalition members and the wider financial community to advance open standards and build a more connected financial ecosystem.

Learn more about the Open Cap Table Coalition and the Open Cap Table Format.