# Canton Blockchain - A Brief Tour

By [Anil Dongre](https://paragraph.com/@anil-dongre) · 2023-05-25

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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](https://storage.googleapis.com/papyrus_images/4d79073ef6b575918fcc3dad060996c0566d09565c14b8d078ecb0e20640d3c2.png)

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](https://storage.googleapis.com/papyrus_images/cf90090b7a76a827b3e178a231b507396503a8903d67f515e137f74939d45bc6.png)

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](https://storage.googleapis.com/papyrus_images/e84f4059396852f95b56ac4551769bf10a36c3d0ad27940b2ec15d6e414e77db.png)

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

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*Originally published on [Anil Dongre](https://paragraph.com/@anil-dongre/canton-blockchain-a-brief-tour)*