CIP-0108: Add Merkle Science’s Predictive Analytics as a Weight 1 SV
CIP-0108
Abstract
This CIP proposes Merkle Science to join the Canton Foundation by adding Merkle Science as a Weight [ ] SV:
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Natively integrate the Canon Network to protect economic activities from illicit and sanctioned activities.
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Actively accelerate the institutional adoption via 100+ global customers.
Ecosystem Protection: Merkle Science will deploy its industry-leading predictive analytics to enable real-time detection of sanctioned and illicit activity. This serves as a foundational layer of network security required to meet increasing regulatory obligations for financial institutions and stablecoin issuers. Such infrastructure is a prerequisite for institutional adoption of Canton.
Institutional Adoption: The initial onboarding of a stablecoin issuer is expected to generate 15M+ transactions annually beginning April 2026. Within 90 days of approval, Merkle Science will make Canton available to 100+ customers, including global exchanges, custodians, stablecoin issuers, and wallets. At least three enterprise customers generating a minimum of 30M in annual transaction volume will go live on Canton within six months, supported by letters of intent.
Motivation
Ecosystem Protection: Regulators (FATF, OCC, SEC, CFTC) and financial institutions expect embedded security infrastructure capable of handling complex transaction flows across wallets, DEXs, bridges, and smart contracts—particularly against sophisticated actors (e.g., state-sponsored groups such as DPRK). Merkle Science delivers proven predictive analytics designed to supersede traditional crypto compliance models, which are increasingly insufficient for today’s threat landscape.
Institutional Adoption: Merkle Science acts as a critical bridge between blockchain infrastructure and financial institutions, exchanges, wallets, and stablecoin issuers. Native integration will enable 100+ existing Merkle Science customers to deploy liquidity and economic activity on Canton. This delivers measurable institutional adoption and increases the utility and burn of Canton Coin.
Milestone Specification
| Deliverable | Acceptance Criteria | Deadline | Weight Earned |
|---|---|---|---|
| Activating Predictive Risk Analytics for Institutional Adoption | Predictive AI-Risk Detection: Deliver proprietary heuristics and behavioral analytics on Canton to identify sanctioned and illicit actors based on transaction timing and volume patterns.<br><br>Provide a complimentary enterprise license to the Canton Foundation.<br><br>Provide freemium licenses to featured applications (up to 1,000 screenings per year per application).<br><br>The reward is linked to guaranteed uptime of 99% and approval of the GSF, with the option to revoke SV weight if evolving security needs are not met. | 3 months from approval | +1.0 |
Measurement & Reporting
The following measurement and reporting standards will be adopted to validate the milestone delivery.
Milestone 1 Approval Criteria Accountability Validation:
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Analytics deployment: reviewer verifiable demo post deployment Licenses issuance: recorded via e-mail invites to GSF/community members
About Merkle Science
Merkle Science is an AI-powered blockchain analytics platform providing actionable real-time intelligence. Founded in 2018, the company supports 27 blockchains and is trusted by 100+ customers, including Crypto.com, Laser Digital, Consensys, and Hudson River Trading. Merkle Science provides critical security infrastructure to drive institutional adoption by preventing high-profile threat actors from accessing on-chain financial services. The company has raised $27M in funding from Susquehanna, Uncorrelated Ventures, Digital Currency Group, and Kenetic
Rationale
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To foster trust, transparency, and collaboration within the Global Synchronizer ecosystem, Merkle Science will apply its proprietary technologies to protect against sanctioned and illicit activities in pursuit of safeguarding institutional adoption.
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Whilst access to our technology increases the transparency, this proposal also enhances collaboration by extending API access to the critical infrastructure and featured applications to benefit from the enterprise services.The onboarding and complimentary access is aligned with the suggested weight of 2.0 based on the current minting schedule.
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Finally, the previously collected feedback from SVs underscore the importance of this protection to strengthen the trust within the canton community.
SV Rewards Mechanism
- An extraBeneficiary PartyID associated with the ‘escrowed’ Super Validator will be setup by the Foundation, or another SV node operator approved to provide SV rewards escrow services, with an SV Weight at the maximum earnable weight.
- The Applicant is responsible for coordinating the process of setting up the escrowed weights with the GSF and the operator of the SV node.
- The Applicant is responsible for all costs associated with the operation of the escrow SV.
- The escrow SV will NOT mint rewards on a block-by-block basis.
- All escrow SV rewards will go to the Unclaimed Rewards pool.
- ⅔ of the Super Validator Operators will update their configurations to allow the escrowing SV node to host the full weight to be earned by the given Super Validator.
- Applicant is required to present proof of successful completed milestones to the Tokenomics Working Group.
- Applicant must present a calculation for the number of Canton Coin it should earn for meeting milestone requirements.
- If the Tokenomics Working Group agrees the milestone has been met and approves the calculation, an announcement will be sent via the Tokenomics-Announce mailing list.
- The GSF will update the extraBeneficiary to an active PartyID controlled by that Super Validator.
- ⅔ of Super Validator Operators will then assign a portion of the Unclaimed Rewards to be minted by the Applicant’s Validator, based on the approved calculation.
Changelog
- Revision 2026-02-16
- Draft: 2025-12-16
Copyright
This CIP is licensed under CC0-1.0: Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal.
