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Canton Blockchain - A Brief Tour

Canton is privacy enabled distribute ledger and ledger protocol that is enhanced when deployed with complementary blockchains. It enables multi-party applications that synchronize between multiple blockchains and traditional IT systems while maintaining privacy and compliance requirements such as GDPR.

Parties

  • Represent a person or another legal entity

  • A party can play a role of Signatory, Observer, Controller or Maintainer

Participant Nodes

  • The party doesn’t talk directly to an underlying distribute ledger or the database. It goes through an intermediary and that intermediary is called the participant node

  • The participant node exposes public API for the parties to access the ledger

  • Multiple parties can be connected one participant node and one party can be hosted by more than one node. In the later case a single party hosted by multiple nodes will be recognized in Canton by unique party ID

  • The participant node also exposes an admin API which helps manage connections, add/remove parties, upload archives and run diagnostics

Figure 1 - The architecture
Figure 1 - The architecture

  • The participant node talks to the drivers through the Canton protocol and the protocol talks to the ledger

Domains

  • Participant nodes, domain nodes, the services and the APIs constitute a Domain also called a synchronization domain

  • One or more participant nodes can join a domain

  • A participant node can join more than one domain

  • This ability for participant nodes to join across domains makes it possible to create a virtual global ledger

  • With sub-transaction privacy canton enables a high level of composability while allowing any domain to freely scale without dependency on any other domain because each domain is private and segregated

Sub-transaction Privacy

Figure 2 - No Sub-transaction Privacy
Figure 2 - No Sub-transaction Privacy

  • Suppose a there are three parties

  • Party A sends a transaction containing data for Party B and Party C

  • Without sub transaction privacy the entire data will be seen by both B and C

Figure 3 - Sub-transaction privacy
Figure 3 - Sub-transaction privacy

  • Canton’s sub-transaction privacy ensures a participant sees only the data it is meant to see

  • This data transmission is fully encrypted

Canton Identities

  • All parties are represented by a unique identifier

  • The format consists of an alias::fingerprint