CIP-TBD: Add Noves as a Super Validator of Weight 3 - Ben Roy
Number: TBD
Title: Add Noves as a Super Validator of Weight 3
Author: Ben Roy, Noves
Status: Draft
Type: Governance
Created: 2026-01-25
License: CC0-1.0
Abstract
This CIP proposes granting Noves participation as a Super Validator with Weight 3 in exchange for delivering privacy-preserving, verifiable reporting infrastructure for Featured App rewards.
The system enables governance bodies to understand why Featured App rewards are being earned and whether they are economically justified - without exposing private transactions, counterparties, or customer data.
Noves will deliver a node-local reporting system that runs inside Featured App operators' environments and produces aggregated, anonymized, verifiable reports for governance consumption. This project extends infrastructure that Noves already operates in production across 95+ Canton node deployments.
Motivation
The Problem
Canton's Featured App reward mechanism operates on a mix of public reward signals (e.g., Featured App Activity Markers) and private transaction activity that is not observable outside the relevant participants’ environments. While public marker data can be aggregated and analyzed by anyone, governance still lacks the measurement layer required to interpret incentives economically and operationally. As a result:
Governance committees cannot reliably determine:
What activity generated rewards
How much network traffic cost / load was incurred by the underlying private activity
Whether rewards are efficient relative to observed network costs
Whether rewarded activity is broadly distributed or concentrated (without exposing identities)
Oversight currently relies on:
Partial public signals
Manual investigation
Unverified self-reporting
This creates systemic risk to token emissions, governance credibility, and legitimate Featured App operators.
Current Failure Modes
No verifiable visibility into private reward-generating activity
No accurate attribution of traffic cost to rewards
No contextual explanation of observed activity
Reactive enforcement ("stop first, ask later")
Increasing pressure to restrict rewards without sufficient data
Reward emissions have reached scale, abuse has already occurred, and governance bodies are actively intervening. This problem is being solved now regardless; the question is whether it is solved well.
Why This Is Network Infrastructure
This proposal establishes a missing layer in Canton's architecture: verifiable accountability for private incentives.
Unlike discretionary applications, reward oversight is foundational to Canton's economic design. Without better tooling, governance interventions will continue to be blunt and inefficient, increasing governance burden and risking discouragement of legitimate application development.
Relationship to Marker Metadata Efforts (Complementary)
There is a separate, complementary governance effort to improve the public-layer interpretability of Featured App Activity Markers by requiring standardized metadata (e.g., activity category, notional ranges, actor types) and setting expectations around abuse mitigation.
This proposal does not compete with that effort. Instead:
Marker metadata helps explain intent (what apps declare publicly).
Noves helps explain impact (what it cost, how it behaved, and how participation is distributed), using privacy-preserving, node-local measurement that is not derivable from public data alone.
Why Super Validator, Not a Grant?
No active grants program with appropriate timeline
Grants incentivize delivery, not long-term operation
This is ongoing infrastructure stewardship, not one-time construction
SV allocation enables rapid deployment
SV rewards support ongoing operational costs
Matches precedent for mission-critical infrastructure services
About Noves
Mission: Noves' mission is to make blockchain activity intelligible, verifiable, and usable for real decision-making, with a particular focus on high-complexity and partially private networks. On Canton, Noves focuses on enabling visibility into activity that cannot be indexed publicly, without compromising privacy or network guarantees.
Existing Deployments: Noves software is already deployed on 95+ Canton nodes, operating in production environments. These deployments include validator-adjacent and application-adjacent nodes and are actively indexing private Canton transaction data locally.
Production Capability: The Noves Data App is an on-prem, node-local application deployed alongside Canton nodes. It indexes and analyzes private Canton transactions visible to that node, providing structured data, semantic classification, and per-transaction traffic cost attribution — all without exfiltrating raw private data.
Unique Positioning: Noves does not claim exclusivity over public marker aggregation or basic marker analytics. Noves is uniquely positioned in its ability to operate production, node-local infrastructure that measures private-layer properties that are structurally non-derivable from public data alone (e.g., traffic cost attribution, private transaction intensity/structure, and anonymized participation distributions), and to convert those into governance-grade aggregates without exposing raw private data.
Specification
System Overview
Noves will deliver a node-local reporting system that runs inside Featured App operators' environments and produces aggregated, anonymized, verifiable reports for governance consumption.
The system:
Accesses private data only within the operator's node
Generates standardized metrics
Attests to their origin via trusted third-party software
Submits results to governance without exposing sensitive details
Key Design Principles
Principle
Implementation
Privacy-preserving by default
No raw transactions, no counterparties, no customer identity
Verifiable, not self-reported
Data generated by independent Noves software
Governance-aligned
Schema defined jointly with committees
Non-enforcing
Surfaces data only; governance retains decision authority
Low operational burden
Minimal effort for Featured App operators
Data Characteristics
Included (Aggregated):
Total reward-generating transactions
Aggregate traffic cost
Aggregate rewards earned
Time-based breakdowns (e.g., per reporting period)
Ratios (rewards ÷ cost)
Anonymized participation counts
Explicitly Excluded:
Raw transactions
Counterparty identity
Customer identity
Per-transaction disclosures
Business-sensitive details
Trust & Verification Model
Attestation is provided by independent Noves software running inside the operator's environment. Because data is generated directly from node-local indexed activity by a third-party system, reports are materially more trustworthy than self-reported submissions.
No cryptographic proofs are required in the initial phase. Architecture supports future cryptographic enhancements if required by governance.
Technical Dependencies
Canton Core Changes: None required. The system operates entirely off-chain and node-local.
Integration Burden: Deployment of the Noves Data App alongside existing node. No application-level code changes or custom reporting pipelines required.
Phased Implementation
Phase 0 — Verified Reporting
Automatically populate existing committee reporting forms
Quantitative fields sourced directly from node-local indexed data
Qualitative explanations remain operator-authored
Submissions occur directly from within Noves Data App
Reporting cadence aligns with committee review cycles (approximately monthly)
Phase 1 — Structured Data & Dashboard
Replace form-first workflow with structured dataset submission
Weekly reporting into Noves-hosted centralized datastore
Committees gain dashboard access for:
Cross-app comparison
Trend analysis
Ratio-based evaluation (rewards vs cost)
Deliverables for Full SV Reward
Add Noves as a Super Validator with maximum earnable Weight 3.
#
Deliverable
Acceptance Criteria
Deadline
Weight Earned
1
Phase 0: Build Complete
Reporting system built, deployed, and ready for Featured App onboarding
+30 Days from CIP Approval
1
2
Production Validation
≥5 Featured Apps have submitted a report through the system
+60 Days from CIP Approval
0.5
3
Phase 1: Dashboard Live
Structured data submission to Noves-hosted datastore operational; committee dashboard with cross-app comparison and trend analysis available
+90 Days from CIP Approval
1
4
Phase 1 Acceleration Bonus
0.5 if delivered by Day 60; linear sliding scale to +0 at Day 90
+90 Days from CIP Approval
Max 0.5
Total Earnable Weight: 3.0
SV Reward Mechanics
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 Canton Foundation 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 is required to present a calculation for number of Canton Coin it should earn for meeting the requirements of the milestone.
If the Tokenomics Working Group agrees the milestone has been met and agrees with the calculation, an announcement will be sent via the Tokenomics-Announce mailing List.
The Canton Foundation 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 calculation approved by the Tokenomics working group.
If any milestones and associated rewards are not achieved by the deadline:
Applicant will be notified they have not met a deliverable by the Canton Foundation.
Remaining SV Weight assigned to the extraBeneficiary SV will be removed from the Canton Foundation node configuration, and the total SV weight of the Canton Foundation SV node will be reduced by the same amount by a vote of the Super Validators.
The Tokenomics Working Group will make a recommendation to the SVs on what to do with the Unclaimed Rewards.
Applicant is subject to CIP-0045: SV Operating Requirements.
If, at any time, the Applicant has been rewarded SV Weight > 2.5, they are required to operate their SV within 6 months of crossing that Weight. This SV node will join the network with an SV weight of zero (0) and may add weights as the SV completes the milestones listed in this CIP.
Scope & Governance Alignment
In Scope
Featured App reward reporting only
Reward mechanisms including transfers and app markers
Aggregated, privacy-preserving metrics
Committee-facing dashboards and reports
Out of Scope
Non-Featured App activity
Enforcement or penalty mechanisms (governance retains full discretion)
Raw transaction disclosure
Real-time monitoring (deferred to potential future Phase 2)
Reporting as Featured App Requirement
This reporting system is intended to be a requirement for Featured App status. Operators who do not run the reporting infrastructure would not be eligible for Featured App rewards.
Metrics and reporting schema are defined jointly by Noves and the relevant governance committees and may evolve over time.
Risk Disclosure
Risk
Mitigation
Adoption slower than expected
Phase 0 target is conservative (5 apps); mandatory status creates compliance incentive
Featured App count decreases significantly
Milestones based on absolute achievable numbers, not percentages; governance attestation is output-based
Data disputes from operators
System is non-enforcing; governance retains discretion; disputes resolved through normal committee process
Noves operational issues
95+ existing deployments demonstrate operational capability; standard SLA commitments
Noves exits market
Open to code escrow and transition arrangements if requested by governance
Long-Term Commitment
Noves commits to ongoing operation and maintenance of the reporting infrastructure beyond initial milestone delivery. SV weight provides the ongoing funding mechanism for this stewardship.
The system is designed to outlive any single reporting cycle.
Network Impact & Value
For Governance
Reliable, timely, defensible oversight data
Reduced manual investigation burden
Higher confidence in reward policy decisions
For Featured Apps
Minimal compliance burden (deploy Noves Data App)
Predictable reward continuity for legitimate operators
Reduced risk of sudden enforcement actions
For the Network
Better alignment of incentives and value creation
Improved token emission discipline
Stronger governance credibility
Reduced systemic risk from opaque reward mechanisms
Alternatives Considered
Alternative
Why Not Chosen
Foundation builds internally
No existing capability; Noves already has 95+ deployments and operational expertise
Public data dashboards only
Public markers can show counts/timing/categories, but cannot attribute traffic cost, private transaction intensity/structure, or governance-grade participation distributions
Enhanced self-reporting
Unverifiable; current failure mode
Grant funding
No active program; grants fund construction, not ongoing stewardship
Do nothing
Oversight continues via blunt restrictions; harms legitimate developers
Copyright
This CIP is licensed under CC0-1.0: Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal.
Changelog
2026-01-25: Initial draft of the proposal.---- Hi Juan / Noves team, thanks for submitting this proposal.We agree that these data and reporting efforts are crucial to our governance efforts. Similar to Tharimmune's initial CIP proposal which had similar dashboard and data commitments, this initiative would likely be more appropriate as a DevFund grant. Now that the governance CIP has passed, this would be a great way to start that process.With regard to general dashboarding and data efforts, I'd like to highlight a few critical efforts:
- Traffic spent and traffic spent per transaction
- Markers submitted
- Non-CC transaction count by contract and asset / tokens
Kind regards,Alex--Cumberland
