Buildcast with Proof Group

Captions as YouTube publishes them, usually machine-generated, so names such as Daml and Canton can be misheard.

1. 0:01

   As markets move on chain, Trfy and crypto markets converging on Canon, the world's biggest institutions, highest quality assets, and onchain innovators already here, the first public blockchain network with privacy. Every 2 weeks, we'll showcase the applications and use cases shaping the future of finance. The ecosystem is growing, new markets are forming, and this is just the beginning. Welcome to the Canton

2. 0:25

   Buildcast, where new connections create new possibilities. In this edition, the folks at Proof Group show us the first blockage for it for Phantom network, highlighting rapid network adoption and how rising volumes of Phantom coin transactions shine a light on the network's increasing utility across Trady and onchain capital markets.

3. 0:43

   There's more to build and connections to be made. So, come and find your place on Kanto. Let's go. Hi, Benjerald here and we're back again for another buildcast and I'm very excited to be joined today by Chris and Kyle from Proof Group. Today we're going to cover all things onchain data, how proof group is surfacing some really cool insights from the Canton network, and we're going to take a look at the first block explorer of a Canton. Chris

4. 1:07

   Kyle, welcome to the Billcast. You're you're dialing in from the New York office at Digital Asset, right? You're at the the DA Summit. How's it going over there? What's uh what's the news on the ground? Yes, it is great. Uh vibes here are are very strong. Um and uh people are excited to come build, especially on Canton. It's been a great experience. Thanks for having us. Cool.

5. 1:28

   Hopefully you're going to go along to the uh to the the can meet up tonight as well. We'll be there. Yes. Cool. Let's get started. Let's um start maybe hearing a little bit about Proof Group. You've been in and around the crypto space for a long time. You know, you guys are really experienced. Tell us a bit about who Proof Group is. Uh what the firm's really doing uh in the space and the opportunities you've you've been looking at across the the whole blockchain and crypto ecosystem.

6. 1:54

   Yes, thank you very much for having us. Uh we're very excited to be on the Canton build guest. Um just by way of introduction, I'm Chris Chur, head of infrastructure for Proof Group and enjoyed by my friend Kyle Saska, a lead engineer who's described our Canton Explorer and application. Uh Proof Group is investment fund founded by Noah Jessup in 2021. Managed two sequential funds of liquid and private investments.

7. 2:15

   Their most recent fund closing this past January. Uh our approach extends beyond just capital investments. We actively help our portfolio ecosystems and other high commission projects through infrastructure support allowing us to deeply engage with protocols we back and discover emerging teams within these ecosystems. This is what led us to discovering Canton and began leaning into the ecosystem over a year ago.

8. 2:36

   Proof group was one of the first participants to run node on Canton and is one of the only participants in the ecosystems that touches all aspects by running a validator, super validator and now an application. Uh we're one of the largest users of the Canton blockchain by transactions and who has several nodes for other parties. Uh we're very excited to explore our block explorer today. Awesome. I'm very excited to see it too. And just just the question I always like to ask about the beginning

9. 3:00

   is why Canton, right? You you work with a lot of chains, a lot of firms in this space. What what attracted you to Canton specifically? Yeah, I think what's really exciting is the intersection between, you know, capital markets, uh, traditional finance firms and really like true web 3 builders. Uh, I started my career at CME Group, which la and helped, uh, was on the team that launched their Bitcoin futures project. So, I understand kind

10. 3:23

    of the traditional market side of things and Canton is very exciting for that kind of uh, use case. Yeah. So servicing onchain data, the analytics on that, the the ability to run other services for compliance or augmenting block data is really big business now. And with the public can network now there's more and more the block data available. But of course the design of the network infrastructure was really aimed at surfacing the key data that would best

11. 3:48

    support the network insights and analysis but while also maintaining that transactional privacy for participants that really makes Canton unique. So, you know, as a firm that's really spent a lot of time looking at block explorers and the data from public chains, what data is it that you're seeing coming from Canton that you think is really interesting for anyone considering uh participating in the network? It it's a great question and and like you said, Canton is very unique in the sense that it mixes both private and public data.

12. 4:16

    Um, we're really looking to close the knowledge gap between people who are technically in the weeds on can and probably interacting with it programmatically versus the people who fill non-technical roles. So these would be people who are in compliance or who are in regulatory, who are doing auditing and who just need high assurance about the state of the chain.

13. 4:40

    Um right now what that looks like today is largely the governance of the chain itself as well as the native token cancoin. Uh in the future though we see this opening up to a lot of optional people who want to uh how should I put it uh make available to us certain signals of their data for the benefit of their customers in the effort of collaborating across the subnets on Canton.

14. 5:06

    Okay very interesting. So it is very much that you know block explorers going into the transactional level details seeing the rounds the events everything that's happening at that kind of granular level for people um which is maybe different from a more kind of you know transactional dustboard looking at people looking at more the activity at a a kind of a trading level let's say it's it's more operational level we we believe that there are a few major

15. 5:30

    stakeholders of an application like this uh first and foremost is the developers these are people who are directly interacting with the chain and like the easy convenient feedback provided from being able to see it visualized through our application. Uh the second is the investor class who is very interested in understanding at a macro level what is taking place on Canton, how things are

16. 5:52

    trending, how parties are interacting and what general activity looks like. Uh and then the third stakeholder is really somebody who has the responsibility of making sure that they understand the integrity of the chain uh and exercise the ability to audit it or participate in governance and therefore they need the ability um to really uncover uh a lot of signal through the chain itself uh in in that effort.

17. 6:20

    All right, cool. So let's get into the fun part then Carl. I'd love to see what you've built. Can you show us the block explorer? Explain some of the key insights, some of the interesting things you're seeing in the network right now.

18. 6:30

    Maybe talk about a little bit how people can access the data and what they can start to think about now that we're surfacing some of this information about the network. Oh, I would love to. Um, I think the first place to start when we look at the Canton data is to look at the big world view. So, this would be sort of the top down aggregate level views of the network. Um so when you visit our uh

19. 6:54

    block explorer uh the first thing that you're going to see are a bunch of useful highle statistics. For example, the total amount of caning coins in circulation as well as the number of parties that are interacting with the chain. Uh and things like transaction volumes per unit time. Uh this plot here is showing you things like uh the balances of cantoncoin held by all the actors in the network. And this is

20. 7:18

    really a proxy of where the value is being generated and where value is changing hands within the network over time. Um, furthermore, we can break things down by who's actually using the chain. This is how the actual ledger space is being allocated per user. Um, and then finally, we have some sense of what it's being used for. In this case, we see a lot of activity in canton coin changing hands as well as the governance of the chain itself.

21. 7:45

    Oh, this is really cool because we can see that you know obviously since Genesis in July last year um you know we had these kind of uniform rounds and and the number of participants obviously at day one and we can see that volume growing obviously um o over time and also the reward splits by the different types of participants in the network here. Can you just dig into a little bit more of what we can see here in terms of the growth of the network maybe KL?

22. 8:07

    Yeah, absolutely. So really there's been two main drivers behind the growth of the network. Um what you can see is that things really ramp up towards the end of 2024 in particular in December. This is due largely to the introduction of applications. Uh the end of December was when a lot of applications began to onboard and this is evident in the increased amount of transaction volume from a lot of existing participants who

23. 8:31

    really found themselves at the epicenter of these new transactions. Additionally, we can see that there's a lot of new users that have been onboarded uh in the form of validators uh that have really come in starting in February of 2025.

24. 8:45

    So, it's the increase in the number of active participants in the network as well as the increase in the prolifacy of a lot of these other existing users um that has driven a lot of the network growth in the past six months. Yeah, one of the things I would even kind of uh highlight there is on this chart on the transactions per day um well over 100,000 transactions per day are now

25. 9:07

    happening on Canton. And that's pretty monumental when you consider Ethereum which is doing about a million transactions per day. That uh you know Canton in its infancy right now is almost like a tenth the amount of transactions per day and we expect that to keep growing um quite quite by a lot in the near future. So next we're going to take a look at a view that goes over the live actors within the network. So

26. 9:31

    this is monitoring actual nodes that are participating in the network right now. Uh each one of them has a canton coin balance as well as the last time that they were seen uh interacting with the network via transaction. And if we want more color, we can click into any of these and instantly bring up a screen that is going to describe to us a little bit in particular about the entity. So the entity is furnished with a name that

27. 9:56

    is native to Kanton. Uh as well as a particular Kenton coin balance and their growth statistics over time. Uh here in this plot we can see the uh amount of Kensington coin balance growth for this particular user as well as their growth in terms of the fractional ownership of all coins in the network. Um and if we wanted to ask the question what is this node doing and how are they

28. 10:21

    participating and how are they involving themselves with the network that's described here in the sort of macro breakdown of the kinds of transactions that they're firing off over time and the way that they're engaging with Canton. Um, additionally, we could for out of convenience search for a user up here. So, I can type in proof and the system will automatically know to pull up proof group and show our validator.

29. 10:44

    And again, we get a similar level of statistics about what our cancoin growth has looked like due to our interactions over time as well as the kinds of things that we've done. As you can see here, we have a big spike in our transaction volume when we started participating in the application ecosystem in late 2024.

30. 11:04

    This is this is very cool because obviously with you know with Canon we're using Canon coin as a kind of proxy to show um the fees being burned on the network the kinds of things that people are participating in you know in a way that's maybe different from other explorers where you could see all other kinds of information about who counterparties are and who people are trading with that kind of thing. This is very much using count on coin as that as that proxy for the activities. you can really see, you know, at the validator

31. 11:28

    level which applications people are participating in and therefore which applications are providing real utilities to the network to the people that are there, which of those featured apps are really driving the volume. I think this is a really great insight for people looking at the network from that perspective. So, it's really cool.

32. 11:42

    Absolutely. Um, we agree and and we think that this is going to furnish everybody's understanding about what is really getting traction um and and sort of where the real product market fit is and and to sort of build in those directions.

33. 11:56

    um towards the sort of direction of building we even have things like live feeds of activity in the network. Um this is sort of thought of typically as like RPC behavior. This is a way of taking the kinds of activity that's happening in Canton and breaking it out to people who need to aggregate this data and use it as input for various systems. Um, at a technical level, this is sort of wrapping a websocket around the actual activity that's going on in Camden right now. Um, and we believe that this in combination with the

34. 12:31

    analytics that we're providing is a good foundation for what will eventually be the the go-to platform for understanding what's happening on Canton. So, awesome. I that's a really good foundation. Um, it really highlights where we are today. Well, what's what's coming next? Obviously, we're in a V1 now and we're live. people can start talking to you guys about this and and getting their hands on the data, but what's what's coming next? Absolutely.

35. 12:54

    So, the immediate next goal for us is to really finish off the integration with applications and subscriptions. This is currently the modality by which people are interacting with Canton to develop value for the network. So, it's important to us that we're able to sort of parse this data and make it available to everybody um as easily as possible.

36. 13:15

    Uh beyond that, we're looking for a lot of potential integrations with stakeholders of the network who have data that is not currently volunteered to the global synchronizer uh for the benefit of their customers and for collaboration with other subnets. Fantastic. So that's going to start to surface some of the information um from as you say the other networks across Canton where you know we obviously have seen a lot of activity in

37. 13:39

    the you know the the private subnets of Canton. We often talk about the the trillions of repo that's going across the network. We talk about other other big numbers in Canton which um obviously haven't been able to be surfaced in because they're not connected to the synchronizer in the same way. Um but you will be a a good confluence I think for all that data over time and um it' be really exciting to see that um come into the into the explorer as well. So yeah really excited to see that. Absolutely.

38. 14:04

    And and we approach these collaborations with a respect for the privacy of the data held by these counterparties. Um we do foresee that eventually though this ends up looking a bit like a data brokering service where this is a hub where different parties can get together and mutually benefit from sharing the right pieces of data and that's really on theme of Canton is privacy for the

39. 14:28

    right data and collaboration for the right data and that's really where we think and I think where Kanton aligns with us that the value is generated. So, as I said, we're live. This is now available to to the network. Who can who can access this today? And uh how can people get in touch with you guys? Yeah, sure. So, um you know, please feel free to reach out to myself, Chrisgroup.xyz, uh to get connected, you know, immediate use case will be, you know, other

40. 14:53

    validators that want to kind of connect into this to to use the application to check out their own rewards, uh reporting and whatnot for their for their back office. Um certainly all the applications we're going to kind of put them front and center um as we kind of roll out more features for this and get their application uh rewards and and statistics kind of uh put on our front pages here. Um and any other you know

41. 15:19

    developers or just people looking to learn about the ecosystem feel free to kind of check out the public facing domain and uh we look forward to hearing any feedback that you guys had as well. uh we're we're love to kind of collaborate and build this uh across the ecosystem.

42. 15:34

    Yeah. Well, we look forward to to seeing this develop and you know, maybe we should have you back on a monthly basis to to give us the latest and greatest insights from the network cuz I think you guys are going to be the closest to it uh at the moment and you know, well done for getting there first. So, thanks so much for joining us on the Billcast today, both of you. Enjoy the uh the

43. 15:50

    rest of the digital asset summit this week and the uh the free drinks at the Canton party tonight. Absolutely. Thank you so much, everyone. Good day, too. It's a wrap for this episode of the Canton Buildcast. Want to dive deeper? Check out the links below to learn more.

44. 16:05

    Connect to apt or bring your assets and use cases to Canton. And don't forget to hit subscribe to stay on top of the latest apps and opportunities shaping institutional grade onchain finance. Bye for now.