Before we get started, this is not a recommendation or endorsement to buy any token mentioned. DeFi Dad holds no CANTO and as always, will disclose if ever writing about a protocol/token he holds a position in.
You might be wondering, “What the hell is Canto?!” If you missed the recent write-up by Jesse Walden in Coin Review, and still didn’t notice CANTO is trending as one of the “most viewed” tokens on CoinGecko, we got you covered today.
Canto is a blockchain secured by Canto validator nodes and an EVM execution layer via Cosmos SDK. Unlike most Cosmos chains, Canto is EVM-compatible, meaning users can conveniently connect their familiar crypto wallets such as MetaMask. Canto was built to “deliver on the promise of DeFi” enabling new digital finance that would be accessible, transparent, decentralized, and free. It is designed to support “free public infrastructure,” while eliminating common centralized incentives in DeFi. In Canto’s own words:
- There is no official foundation.
- There was no presale.
- There is no vesting.
- There are no venture backers.
Before we continue, I would push back on the nuance of these points above–yes there is officially no foundation, presale, vesting, or venture backers but make no mistake, there is clearly a core community/team of contributors behind Canto (who btws received 130M CANTO upon token genesis), who likely injected capital to jumpstart Canto liquidity like any DeFi startup. The most notable of those initial contributors is Scott Lewis, a legend of DeFi as the founder of DeFi Pulse, the person who coined TVL, the inventor of the first DEX aggregator, and much more.
Canto has clearly benefited from his notoriety as a DeFi builder and he has managed to bridge the gap between Ethereum and Cosmos as a credible figure demonstrating how one might leverage the composability of Cosmos IBC for new and powerful DeFi applications.
The primitives which make up the free public infrastructure of Canto are:
- Canto DEX: A zero-fee DEX for liquidity providers
- Canto Lending Market (CLM): A fork of Compound V2
- NOTE: A fully collateralized unit of account token issued by the CLM which also serves the ecosystem as a USDC/USDT soft-pegged stablecoin
- CANTO: The native token of the Canto network, used to pay gas fees for transactions and can be staked with validators to help secure the network.
Here’s how Canto aims to differentiate itself as a Cosmos and EVM compatible blockchain designed to support free and accessible DeFi:
Liquidity as a Free Public Good: Meaning zero fees for LPs. Canto makes liquidity free for protocols, arbitrageurs and traders.
Rent Extraction Resistant: As free public infrastructure, core DeFi primitives will not have governance tokens, nor the capacity to extract rent in the future.
Minimal Viable User Capture: Canto will avoid application-owned UIs (ie a Uniswap-owned site for Uniswap protocol). The intent is for users to trade on third-party aggregators, ensuring they get the best possible price and liquidity, and hopefully prevent UI-driven monopolies on users, like we’ve witnessed with Uniswap’s popular front-end.
At token genesis, the total supply of CANTO was 1,000,000,000 tokens, with an initial circulating supply of 150,000,000 CANTO tokens, 130M of which went to “initial…
DeFi Dad is one of the earliest power users of DeFi, having worked with early Ethereum startups going back to 2018, including Zapper.
