C# / .NET SDK for Canton Network #46 - Milestone 4: Adoption & Ecosystem Integration

Milestone 4: Adoption & Ecosystem Integration

• Opens: on M3 acceptance.
• Deadline: 18 months from grant approval — explicit exception to the standard 9-month default. See Deadline rationale below.
• Focus: Adoption-enabling deliverables (DocFX API reference site, ASP.NET Core sample, coordinated public launch) plus structured engagement with regulated TradFi adopters and active community engagement. The deliverables are built and shipped under M4 because they exist to enable adoption events — for the adopter, not for the SDK to be functionally complete. The SDK itself is feature-complete at M2 acceptance and stabilised, audited, and cross-version-verified through M3.
• Payment structure: decomposed into deliverable tranches and per-event tranches at a fixed 100,000 CC per adoption event, plus a conditional +20% acceleration bonus on early full completion (see Acceleration bonus below). Partial adoption success translates into partial payout rather than a binary forfeit of the whole milestone. Full breakdown in Payment Breakdown by Milestone below.
• Deliverables / Value Metrics:

| Deliverable | Acceptance Criteria | Tranche payout | |-------------|---------------------|----------------| | Comprehensive API documentation | XML docs on all public types; DocFX-generated static site deployed and linked from Canton developer docs | bundled in completion tranche | | Sample: ASP.NET Core integration — C# equivalent of cn-quickstart | Web API that exposes Canton contract data via REST endpoints, with an autogenerated Swagger / Scalar page demonstrating a clean architecture for service-side .NET dApps, and a Token Standard interface example. A browser front-end (Blazor or a TypeScript SPA) is intentionally out of scope; the sample shows how a downstream front-end would consume the same surface, but does not ship one. Built and published as a deliverable — not gated on adoption events. | bundled in completion tranche | | Coordinated public launch | Blog post / dev announcement coordinated with Canton Foundation marketing | bundled in completion tranche | | External-developer validation gate | At least 1 developer outside Peaceful Studio completes the ASP.NET Core sample end-to-end against LocalNet and reports back via a GitHub issue or short write-up | bundled in completion tranche | | Adopting TradFi institution | Each regulated TradFi institution (bank, custodian, exchange operator, asset manager) integrating the SDK against a Canton network. Up to 3 institutions credited. | 100,000 CC per institution (up to 300,000 CC) | | External application on mainnet | Each application built outside Peaceful Studio that uses the SDK to submit transactions on Canton mainnet. Up to 2 applications credited. | 100,000 CC per application (up to 200,000 CC) | | Milestone completion | All of: DocFX site live, ASP.NET Core sample published, external-developer validation gate met, public launch coordinated; ≥500 NuGet downloads across ≥3 unique organisations; ≥5 external GitHub issues or PRs; ≥3 community-reported issues triaged through to resolution. | 250,000 CC | | Conference/meetup presentation (optional) | Present SDK at a Canton or .NET community event if opportunity arises. | — | | M4 maximum (base) | | 750,000 CC |

Acceleration bonus. A +20% bonus of 150,000 CC is added to the M4 payout if all M4 gates above — adoption-enabling deliverables, per-event tranches, and the milestone-completion criteria — are paid in full within 15 months of grant approval. That is three months ahead of the 18-month deadline, leaving roughly nine months of M4 runtime after M3 acceptance (~6 months in, per §Volatility Stipulation) to close adoption events. This follows the convention in merged dev-fund grants (Token Standard V2 +20%, ISS-BFT +20%, LSU +10/20%, PQS +20%, Traffic-Based App Rewards +15%), most of which attach the acceleration clause to a final or adoption milestone rather than to the engineering delivery phase. The bonus pays only if the full base M4 tranche is paid in full — partial M4 completion does not produce a partial bonus. Maximum M4 with acceleration: 900,000 CC. Maximum M1–M4 total (engineering + Cure53 audit + acceleration): 2,855,000 CC — see §Funding for the breakdown.

Deadline rationale. The dev-fund standard is ≤9 months from grant approval. M4 here targets adoption among regulated TradFi institutions whose procurement and integration cycles routinely run 9–18 months for the first conversation alone — a structurally slower adopter set than the developer-tooling adopters typical of other dev-fund grants. A 9-month M4 deadline against this adopter profile is near-certain to forfeit the adoption tranche the proportionality-of-payout-to-adoption principle (raised in PR review) was designed to reward. The 18-month deadline is the shortest window in which multiple TradFi institutions can realistically be expected to close