Ekiden has announced the launch of its mainnet, deploying the first centralized order book-based derivatives exchange infrastructure on Canton Network. As reported by INCRYPTED, the solution is aimed at professional trading firms, market makers, funds, banks, and institutional trading desks. During early testing, the platform demonstrated significant interest: in the first week of operation on the Canton Network testnet, Ekiden recorded 1,502 active users, processing over 72,000 trades with a trading volume of approximately $8.9 million.
The platform combines a centralized limit order book (CLOB), RFQ-based settlement, and PropAMM integration, providing professional participants with a trading terminal and API for connecting aggregators, algorithmic trading platforms, exchanges, and funds. Unlike retail DeFi platforms, Ekiden offers quality execution, deep liquidity, configurable privacy, and infrastructure suited to real professional trading. Ekiden founder and CEO Vitaliy Dervoyed emphasized: "For tokenized assets to trade at scale, institutional participants need quality execution, liquidity, privacy, and workflows that match real professional trading. Canton provides the institutional environment, and we add the infrastructure layer for on-chain derivatives trading." By the mainnet launch, Ekiden had onboarded 12 market makers, including Keyrock, Kappa Lab, and Flowdesk, and is working with 11 integration partners.
The launch comes amid growing institutional interest in digital assets. According to research, 73% of institutional decision-makers plan to increase their digital asset allocation in 2026, and 56% expect to engage with DeFi protocols by 2028. Meanwhile, the traditional derivatives market remains significantly larger: the average daily turnover of OTC interest rate derivatives reached $7.9 trillion in April 2025. In May 2026, Ekiden raised $2 million in a seed round from investors including GSR, Flowdesk, Pyth, Aptos, and others. Following the mainnet launch, the entire lifecycle of a derivatives trade — from execution to settlement — takes place on-chain without exposing positions or capital flows, meeting institutional participants' compliance and privacy requirements.