Wayne Collier

If you were absolutely committed to: - Bringing the global financial system onchain, linking all existing institutions into an interoperable network accessible to anyone - Adding a fully decentralized crypto ecosystem inside that network, with atomic composability among traditional and crypto assets - Allowing anyone in the world to personally own a piece of that network, with self-custody of that ownership stake - Preserving privacy for everyone What would you build? If your understanding of Canton doesn’t fit this picture, let’s dig deeper.

When we say that players across the network are working hard to increase the long-term burn, this is just one example of the kind of use case we're talking about: binance.com/en/square/post/1…

If you're interested in where Canton Network is going, and how we plan to get there, the Foundation has published the 2026-2026 technical vision and roadmap, including requests for grant proposals for the coming year. github.com/canton-foundation… This is just the technical side of the picture. Making it all real means moving lots of Capital Markets workflows, apps, and business relationships to Canton. It's an incredible experience to be able to pair a great technology with amazing firms who have decided to move to Canton. The next two years are going to be a thrilling ride!

Big step. Soon any Validator or app provider will be free to pick any synchronizer, with CC burn happening across all of them.

Great summary of Canton by @bc1pxxx at Five North.

Slowly realizing the original vision...

I'll take a moment for the Canton-native cypherpunks out there. At least as I have worked on / dreamed about it, cypherpunk never meant "rejecting Traditional Finance". It meant being able to move freely in and out of tradfi, and across alternate financial realities. For me, cypherpunk means: - Privacy above all. Cypherpunk means using ZK where it's ready and applicable, and simple cryptography for everything else. Having no option but exposing all of my data is a bridge too far. - Individual control, meaning self-custody. The level of self-custody available in Canton today is beyond what most could imagine when cypherpunk got started, and it's only going to get better. - Asymmetry. Asymmetry means different parts of the network function differently from each other, and that means power in one part of the network can't scale to take over the entire network. Not even massive wealth or government force can dominate. - Decentralization. Decentralization means many centers of power. Asymmetric decentralization means those centers of power can be radically different from each other, mutually independent, and impenetrable. Asymmetric decentralization is where Canton shines. By contrast, symmetric decentralization (Bitcoin, Ethereum L1) copies everything, and works the same way everywhere. That's fine for resilience, but it sacrifices local control. When two mining operators control the majority of Bitcoin, I'm uncomfortable. Isn't concentrated power the inevitable tendency of collectivism? - Composable interoperability. If I can't move freely into and out of TradFi, I'm walking away from the vast majority of the world's wealth and liquidity. Why would I do that? I want full control of all my finances, not part. Canton gives me a path there. And if I can have full control over my own actions, that means institutions also get full control over their own actions. And if we do business, we mutually agree on the terms. I don't see any contradiction there. I can increase my own rights and control over my own destiny without taking rights or control away from others--except from those whose only value comes from controlling me. There's no rift here between me and @ShaulKfir, by the way. Shaul's reacting to the recent co-opting of 'cypherpunk' to mean 'counter-cultural'. Cypherpunk really just means private, asymmetric, and decentralized. It means having too many centers of power for 'counter-cultural' to signify anything at all. You do you.

I agree with @YuvalRooz; thanks for a thoughtful article. Markets need data! So, what's next on Canton? Publicly verified data is valuable, and so is private data. So you'll see an entire data economy emerge on Canton. You'll see individuals and institutions agree to sell appropriately aggregated data. You'll see explorers report on assets and subnets where all the data is public all the time. You'll see pools of attestors validate data sources and generate consensus public data feeds. We might even see some validator pools use ZKPs for the data they publish. Canton is enabling a full range of data sources, from public and permissionless to fully private. No one is going to mandate what you have to share or what you have to hide: each app, each pool of validators, and each set of counterparties can decide what data they value, and whether or not to share it. And the market will decide whose data to trade on, and whose to ignore.

When we talk about decentralization, we're saying that no single entity can take control of a system. There is more than one way to be achieve this, and Canton supports several approaches. For example, most blockchains decentralize through distribution: they give every node the same information, and let every node process it in the same way. We might call this "symmetric" decentralization: each node looks like the others: they all access the same data and perform the same computations. Symmetry gives you great resilience for computational consistency and for data permanence, at the cost of privacy: If you compute a result, all nodes on the chain will get the same result. If you lose data, the chain can restore it for you. But everyone will know everything you're doing. Canton Coin is symmetric: all nodes in the Super Validator pool see every Canton Coin transaction, and reach consensus on them. They also all independently publish what they see, so everyone can verify it. And any 2/3 supermajority of Super Validators could take over Canton Coin and fork it, without any "permission" to do so. Canton Coin is a simple, bearer asset: no controlling entity, no gatekeeper. (There's no @Siegefire big red button). But Canton Coin is just one application on Canton. CBTC is another app on Canton, and it's similar to Canton Coin, with a pool of validators (aka "attestors") that reach consensus on each transaction. But CBTC doesn't make all transactions public. The attestors keep each other honest, and a group of attestors can fork CBTC without any permission from anyone. But to verify the totality of what that pool of attestors is doing, you'd have to join the pool (at least as an observer). This is still decentralization, but with less symmetry: censorship-resistant and resilient, but not visible to everyone. Finally you have private, centralized assets on Canton, where the asset is controlled by a single entity. In these cases, the thing the blockchain gives you out of the box is guaranteed consistency and interoperability (and the liquidity that comes with those two). It takes some extra work to make it fully resilient. If you don't like what the centralized asset owner is doing, you can't raise a team to change it. But Canton's interoperability means that you can just trade your assets for something you like better, and walk away. This interoperability means that even centralized apps contribute to the decentralization of Canton overall: they add to the number of centers of power that control the network, and each user can engage with or ignore the assets they create. Separate control centers, fully independent from each other, but also completely interoperable. The remarkable thing about Canton is that no matter how many different apps you participate in, you see a composed view of your state and transactions across all those apps as a single, composed ledger that is unique to you. And on top of that, you see a steady stream of proofs that all of your counterparties across all of your transactions have the same understanding (inputs and outputs) that you have for each transaction they shared with you. So you're sitting at the nexus of a private chain known only to you, with each element of that chain proven multiple times by multiple independent entities. Canton maximizes decentralization and privacy, and Canton Coin gives you a way to own a piece of the value that comes from integrating across all these many apps. That's why--for me--it's the only chain that actually delivers on the cypherpunk vision. You can read more about various decentralization mechanisms in Canton here: docs.digitalasset.com/overvi… docs.digitalasset.com/operat…

Great summary of decentralization principles.

What it feels like inside the Canton ecosystem today: Taking a breath, and waiting to see how long it will take for the world to figure out what we’ve done.