Daml is an enterprise grade, open-source smart contract language for building multi-party distributed applications on a safe, privacy-aware runtime. Learn more about Daml on daml.com.
Different Daml applications running on Canton can interoperate. Digital assets and workflows can freely float between ledgers.
Canton supports sub-transaction privacy, meaning that parties can only see the part of a transaction that specifically applies to them. It is built around the principle of data minimization and enables adhering to the right to be forgotten regulations.
Canton ensures your ledger is always in a valid state, and a corrupted state never occurs — even in the presence of malicious actors.
Canton has no upper bound on how many transactions per second it can process. It can be scaled to achieve any transaction processing speed.
Canton releases are on GitHub. Follow the Getting Started tutorial.
Parties register with one or more Participant Nodes. Nodes can host multiple parties and facilitate party access to the ledger.
Every node can connect through Canton to multiple Daml ledgers. Each Daml ledger instance is called a Domain in Canton.
A domain can be implemented in different ways, depending on the trust requirements. For low trust environments, it can be implemented on a distributed ledger or on enclaves. If a trusted operator exists it can be implemented in a centralized way. Domain Nodes facilitate Canton by acting as a messaging hub and gateway for the participant nodes to the Daml ledgers.
All transaction data transferred between Participant Nodes is end-to-end encrypted and only selectively shared with other Participant Nodes on a strict need to know basis. The domains, therefore, do not learn the transaction contents. Also, Canton guarantees the integrity of ledgers, even in the presence of malicious participants. Furthermore, any Party can extend the ledger at any time without adversely impacting others.
Participant Nodes can at any point choose to connect to multiple domains and transfer workflows between those domains.
Therefore, domains do not impose hard boundaries, and Participant Nodes effectively participate in a Virtual Global Ledger which is composed of all existing domains.
The Virtual Global Ledger is the underlying concept and does not exist physically, but is the result of the Canton's integrity, privacy, auditability and transparency guarantees.
While all domains are conceptually part of the Virtual Global ledger, they are in fact private. No outsider will know that a domain even exists. Nevertheless, participants are not locked into their decision, as they can always connect and transfer their smart contracts to other domains and still benefit from the integrity, transparency and privacy guarantees of the Virtual Global Ledger.
1 + 1 = 1 With other ledgers, if you deploy a second one, you end up with two siloed ledgers. Canton is different. If you deploy a second domain, it is still the same ledger.
Read our Whitepaper to learn about the long-term vision for Canton.
