Canton

Digital Asset and a long list of market participants announced Canton Network on 9 May 2023. The proposal was a network of independently governed Daml applications, not a new corporate ledger jointly owned by every named bank and exchange. Digital Asset had developed the Canton protocol; each application could retain its operator, identities, permissions and legal terms.

The Global Synchronizer TestNet was publicly announced live on 2 August 2023, initially by invitation. After testing, Super Validators voted to take the shared service live on 1 July 2024. Global Synchronizer Foundation accompanied that launch as a governance coordinator and changed only its name to Canton Foundation on 22 September 2025. The Foundation, Digital Asset, the DSO and application operators therefore occupy separate layers of the system.

Canton does not reach privacy by asking every validator to inspect one global state. Daml assigns stakeholder roles, then participant nodes split a transaction into encrypted views. In a delivery-versus-payment workflow, a cash bank can validate the payment view and a securities registrar the asset view; the parties entitled to both can verify the combined atomic result.

The Global Synchronizer orders encrypted messages and gathers confirmations without taking custody of the bond or payment token. Its operators see encrypted traffic and confirmation results under the documented design. This is a precise boundary: signatories, observers and controllers see what their roles require, and automatic divulgence can expose a referenced contract to a transaction party. Privacy depends on application code and operational choices.

Canton Coin deliberately sits on the public side of that boundary. CC positions, transfers, reward distributions and fees are visible, and Cantonscan began exposing balances, validators and governance in June 2025. A private securities leg composed with a CC payment can remain private, but the CC leg does not become hidden.

Canton Coin went live with the Global Synchronizer on 1 July 2024. The project reported no ICO, premine, presale, VC allocation or founder pool. Rather than selling a treasury, the protocol made minting capacity available to contributors that supplied application or infrastructure activity.

The MiCA whitepaper names CC as the Global Synchronizer’s fungible native token and says it has no identifiable issuer. It describes rights to transfer the token, buy synchronizer traffic and make optional application payments. It also lists no redemption or value-protection scheme and says there is no issuer against which to seek recourse. A CC balance is therefore not a claim on Digital Asset, Canton Foundation, a participating bank or an asset recorded in another Canton application.

CC does not enter circulation merely because a block was produced. Network activity creates weighted records. During a round, the protocol calculates how much CC each unit of activity may claim; eligible record owners then mint in the claim phase. Rounds start every 10 minutes by default. The maximum minting curve limits issuance speed, reaching a published steady-state allowance of 2.5 billion CC a year, but it is not a fixed supply cap.

On the other side, buying Global Synchronizer traffic burns CC and creates non-transferable traffic credits. A third party can fund those credits for a validator, so an end user can use the service without personally holding CC. Credits cannot be converted back, and exhausted traffic can stop submissions. CIP-0078 removed transfer and lock fees in 2025; a holding-fee calculation remains for expiring dust contracts whose accrued cost exceeds their value.

The reward mix has already changed. CIP-0096, approved on 31 December 2025, phased the validator liveness cap down to zero on 30 April 2026 because passive uptime rewards were becoming a free-rider subsidy. Current categories instead tie minting to Super Validator operation, featured application activity and validator activity measured under the live rules.

At Splice commit fe492f45a8ba7073120c081b583fa13bd4254be6, AmuletRules is signed by the DSO party and ordinary transfers are controlled by the relevant token parties. The generic AmuletRules_Mint function is explicitly restricted to DevNet. MainNet reward issuance is reached by consuming valid reward inputs through AmuletRules_Transfer, rather than through an administrator calling an unrestricted faucet.

External parties keep another boundary: because their keys are not controlled by validator automation, they either claim rewards themselves or jointly sign a time-limited MintingDelegation. That contract lets the delegate submit a reward-claim transfer for the beneficiary, and it gives both sides termination routes. Delegation changes who performs the claim; it does not change the protocol-calculated allowance.

The stronger control sits with Super Validators acting collectively as the DSO. A ceiling two-thirds confirmation threshold protects the DSO party, while on-chain votes govern Super Validator membership, featured applications, reward weights, fee schedules, issuance curves and traffic pricing. Canton Foundation coordinates this process and operates one SV, but its own documentation says that node has no unilateral authority. Decentralization here is a threshold among a governed operator set, not direct voting by every CC holder.