The Canton Network is where global finance meets the real value of blockchain. A public network designed for institutional-grade use cases with privacy that works.
Trusted by leaders across traditional finance and crypto, from Goldman Sachs and BNP Paribas to DTCC and Circle, Canton enables real-world financial systems to operate onchain.
Historically, bringing institutional assets onchain required difficult trade-offs. Public blockchains prioritized transparency, often at the cost of privacy, control, and safe scalability. All essential for global capital markets and payments.
Canton breaks these trade-offs. Applications define their own permissioning, data-sharing, and operational policies, while operating on a public, interoperable network. The result is a system that combines the openness of DeFi with the control institutions require.
Because Canton fundamentally rethinks how nodes, smart contracts, and consensus operate, it introduces some new vocabulary.
If you're familiar with other public blockchains, most of these concepts will feel intuitive. But a few require a small shift in thinking. Here are 8 key terms to get you started.
Canton Glossary: 8 Terms to Get Started
Figure 1: The different layers of Canton Network
Canton Network is a public blockchain network with configurable privacy, where traditional finance and decentralized finance converge in a unified ecosystem.
Participants, from regulated institutions to DeFi innovators run independent, interoperable applications with highly programmable privacy, governance controls, and cryptographic guarantees of consistency and integrity.
Each smart contract application on Canton can set its own governance, service level agreements (SLAs), and operating policies, yet they can all transact atomically with each other, whilst ensuring data is only shared with participants on a need-to-know basis
Canton Network's design addresses the core barriers of privacy, control, and composability to bring institutional assets and volume onchain — unlocking seamless connections between tokenized real-world assets and decentralized liquidity.
1. Validator
Validators are the public network’s participant nodes — a Validator is an organization’s gateway to using applications on the Canton Network.
Figure 2: Validators on Canton can be self-hosted or managed through your preferred node-as-a-service partner.
Participants run Validators and download applications that use the Global Synchronizer. Validators then process and validate the specific transactions they are directly involved in.
This is what guarantees control over data privacy and direct asset ownership. Validators also serve parties, i.e., wallet addresses that have an identity on the network and use apps on the network.
2. Synchronizer
A synchronizer is a routing and message-ordering service that keeps Validator nodes (also known as participant nodes) in sync, without decrypting or validating the transaction payloads.
Validators connect to one or more synchronizers — which order transactions for them, collect confirmations and then commit the relevant results to each validator node and its independent slice of the global ledger. This process does not require nodes to trust one another.
Synchronizers can be deployed privately by application operators or can be run as decentralized network infrastructure (e.g., the Global Synchronizer).
The good news is that smart contract apps can use multiple synchronizers depending on their needs. So a repo application may use a private synchronizer to reconcile repo agreements between its users, but could use the Global Synchronizer to connect with an onchain cash registry to instantly settle a repo transaction with a tokenized deposit issued from another Canton application.
Figure 3: The synchronizer layer includes the decentralized Global Synchronizer, as well as single operator run synchronizers
3. Global Synchronizer
The Global Synchronizer is a decentrally operated synchronizer, providing a decentralized transaction processing service that forms the native interoperability backbone of the Canton Network.
It is operated by an independent set of organizations that run the software (Super Validators) and is responsible for time-ordering cross-application transactions to keep participants in sync. It coordinates the ordering and confirmation of encrypted messages between participants, preserving privacy and ensuring everyone reaches the same outcome.
Under the hood, the Global Synchronizer runs with Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) consensus so no one organization has more power than any other over operations, and facilitates atomic value exchange across independent applications (i.e., transactions where everything either happens at once or not at all, eliminating settlement risk).
55+ organizations support the decentralized infrastructure, and its open governance is facilitated by the Canton Foundation.
Transactions using the infrastructure are quoted in USD and paid for using Canton Coin, its native utility token, which is also used to incentivize ecosystem growth.
4. Super Validator
In the Canton Network, a Super Validator is the name for any independent organization that supports the operation of the Global Synchronizer.
Figure 4: Super Validators are a broad mix of organizations from across the TradFi and DeFi landscape
Part of that work is for their nodes to validate Canton Coin (a public, permissionless asset) transactions and distribution, as well as contributing to network governance and ongoing protocol development.
Super Validator nodes vote onchain for governance matters and protocol changes related to the Global Synchronizer. Beyond onchain voting, Super Validators also vote on Canton Improvement Proposals and actively participate in broader Canton Foundation member committees and working groups.
Because applications establish their own privacy, access, and governance rules, Super Validators only see the details of the transactions they are part of and need to participate in. They don’t see the details of transactions across the Global Synchronizer.
They cannot decrypt or read the underlying transaction payloads; they operate like secure, decentralized message routers — but with global network consistency guarantees.
💡 The Misconception: Unlike validators in other public blockchains, Canton’s Super Validators cannot see all data or unilaterally censor transactions. They are infrastructure providers that support message ordering and global consistency across the network.
4. Daml
Daml is an open-source smart contract programming language designed for building secure, privacy-preserving multi-party applications.
Created by Digital Asset, Daml enables the configuration and strict enforcement of data privacy, permissions, and authorization at the application level, ensuring granular control over who needs to see what, right down to the different underlying steps of a transaction (see Sub-transaction privacy).
It’s the native, regulatory-grade smart contract language powering the applications on Canton Network.
💡 The Misconception: Developers mistakenly still think Daml is an acronym for "Digital Asset Modeling Language," so often you still see "DAML" in all-caps rather than "Daml."
5. Sub-transaction Privacy
In the Canton Network, you’ll often hear about sub-transaction privacy — the capability that ensures data is only shared between participants on a strictly need-to-know basis.
Complex financial transactions usually have multiple steps and counterparties that need to be involved at different stages of the transaction process. Sub-transaction privacy simply means that at the granular level, you can define who can see what at every underlying step.
These privacy rules are configured with Daml, and then the Canton protocol ensures that parties only receive the specific parts of the transaction that are directly relevant to them. For example, in a Delivery vs. Payment trade, the bank sees only the cash transfer, while the registrar sees only the securities movement.
This is a core architectural feature of Canton, not a privacy ‘add-on’. It contrasts with other networks where privacy is "all or nothing": either making all data visible to everyone, or cryptographically hiding it from view.
With Canton, data is physically segregated, so unauthorized parties simply never receive data they are not supposed to see.
6. Proof of Stakeholder
Proof-of-Stakeholder is a unique consensus model where only the parties directly involved in a transaction are responsible for seeing and validating it.
Unlike Bitcoin’s Proof-of-Work or Ethereum’s Proof-of-Stake mechanisms, Proof-of-Stakeholder does not impose global broadcast or enforce traditional staking requirements for validators.
Because validation is restricted to the stakeholders defined by the underlying Daml smart contract, this model guarantees data privacy and allows the ecosystem to scale without limit by processing independent workflows in parallel.
💡 The Misconception: Unlike many blockchains, where all validators get a full copy of the ledger, transaction validation on Canton is performed only by the stakeholder parties in a transaction, via their Validator nodes.
7. Party
In the Canton Network, a Party is a pseudonymous ID associated with a set of keys. In this sense, it is similar to an Ethereum address or Externally Owned Account (EOA): it represents an entity that can hold assets, sign transactions, and participate in smart contract-based workflows.
A Party can correspond to an individual, a legal entity, or a specific role or account within either. To act on the network, a Party authorizes one or more Validators to operate on its behalf. Parties typically hold their own signing keys externally, and the Validator submits and confirms transactions with the Party's explicit authorization.
Parties take on specific roles within contracts:
- Signatories: Core stakeholders whose cryptographic consent is required to create a contract and who are bound by its terms.
- Observers: Parties with read-only visibility into a contract's state but no power to alter it.
- Controllers: Parties granted specific permissions to execute specific actions on an existing contract.
8. Atomic Composability
Atomic composability on Canton refers to how multiple distinct smart contracts — no matter their underlying synchronizer infrastructure — can be executed together as a single, indivisible transaction.
Either every step of a complex workflow succeeds simultaneously, or the transaction fails with zero changes made to the ledger.
This guarantees risk-free value exchange, such as true Delivery versus Payment (DvP), and eliminates settlement and operational risks by ensuring one leg of a trade never executes without the other.
💡 The Misconception: To introduce some privacy and permissioning, most chains wall off apps and their underlying infrastructure and use bridges between them. This reintroduces messaging between systems and breaks atomic composability. Canton uses a different model, allowing apps to compose with atomic smart contract calls, no matter what infrastructure they use and without privacy or control tradeoffs.
What’s Next?
With these core concepts under your belt, you now have a foundation for understanding how the Canton Network operates.
Understanding the vocabulary is just step one; now get involved and see it in action.
- Connect to the Canton Network: Get started by connecting a validator and exploring live applications, assets, and services across the Canton ecosystem.
- Download the Canton Quickstart: Start building your first local Daml applications by installing the Canton Network Quickstart Application.
- Join the developer forums: Connect with other developers, engineers, and institutions shaping the future of the network in the official forums.
