It was an inspiring discussion about the Canton Network's potential for institutional finance and its Featured Apps. We are excited to share the results, and we are already looking forward to the next event.
On June 23, PixelPlex hosted a live online webinar on the Canton Network, and it turned into one of the most useful technical sessions we have run this year so far. The event, titled “Navigating the Canton Network: Technical Architecture, Tokenomics, and Scaling of the First Institutional Blockchain,” brought together founders, product leaders, and builders from across the Canton developer community and beyond.
Canton has become one of the most discussed ecosystems in digital finance, but a lot of that conversation stays at the surface. With this webinar, we wanted to go a level deeper and answer the questions that matter to people deciding whether to start engaging with the network. Across four presentations and a closing panel, the speakers shared their expertise and brought real substance.
The big picture
Josh Mudway, Canton Network expert at PixelPlex, opened the session with the problem Canton was designed to solve. The network sits between public and private blockchains: it is designed to address the over-transparency of the former and the isolation and limited connectivity of the latter. Canton combines protocol-level privacy, independent control, and cross-application composability in a single network.
From there, he walked through the core building blocks: the Daml smart contract language, validators, Party ID as an identity anchor for dApps, private synchronization, and Canton Coin as the reward layer.
Under the hood
Bernhard Elsner, CPO of Digital Asset, the company that created Canton, had ten minutes for the architecture and used an example of DvP for a real-world asset. He called the ability to atomically compose asset movements the killer use case for blockchain and the backbone of capital markets.
The challenge is that a DvP involves regulated entities. An asset registry brings the asset on chain, a payment provider backs the cash, and neither should learn the other’s private details while both keep control of settlement.
Canton’s answer is selective disclosure. Validator nodes hold state and run consensus, but data is shared only with the stakeholders of each transaction, and parties are on-chain identities hosted on those nodes.
Following the value
Anthony Merriman, founder of Modulo Finance, took tokenomics, opening with a line: A network is only as healthy as the incentives that keep people running it. His core message was that Canton rewards measurable network activity, not passive participation. You are not paid just for holding an asset or running a node. The lifecycle of value runs from application activity to transactions, traffic, coupons, and finally Canton Coin.
He also showed how the rewards split shifts over time. Early on, most issuance went to infrastructure, with Super Validators and Validators taking the larger share. Today, Application Providers earn the majority, with a small slice set aside for a grant fund.
The path to Featured status
Eugene Birski, lead blockchain consultant at PixelPlex, made it practical. How does an application plug in and start to earn? The answer is Featured App status, a governance-approved status on the Global Synchronizer that requires a Super Validator vote. You can run an app on mainnet without it, but rewards will not flow, so it is the gate most teams aim for.
Eugene walked the full path, from a testnet validator and Party ID to the application for Featured App status itself. His advice was to run your own validator rather than depend on a third party, and to find a Super Validator sponsor, either directly or through Digital Asset’s platform. He framed the application as a sensible way to earn without artificial reward extraction, and stressed that the application should include an honest estimate of the load your app will add to the network.
His closing theme was growth through connection: isolated apps see limited activity and limited rewards, while connected apps that share users and compose with others earn more and make a stronger governance case.
The panel
After the presentations, the speakers took questions from each other and the audience on Canton’s future and institutional adoption:
- Adoption: the rapid growth of the past year and a half reflects demand that was bottled up for years, now that Canton offers a viable path (Bernhard). Anthony added that he has had more conversations with large institutions in the past six months than at any point in his crypto career.
- Wallets: Canton wallets feel familiar but delegate private-data handling to validators, so moving between them usually means moving assets rather than exporting a key (Bernhard).
- The flywheel: usage earns rewards, apps reinvest to subsidize traffic and improve the experience, and that draws more usage (Anthony).
- First 100 days: the technical path can move fast, since teams build the full flow locally before testnet and can earn from day one on production (Eugene).
What we took away
The interest in Canton.Network development services is real, and it is coming from serious teams rather than curious onlookers. As Anthony encouraged at the end, anyone exploring Canton should reach out, because people in the ecosystem, PixelPlex included, are glad to help teams get up to speed.
Thank you to Bernhard, Anthony, and Eugene, and to everyone who joined and asked questions. PixelPlex will keep following the Canton ecosystem closely, and we would be glad to run more sessions like this one. If there is a topic you want us to cover next, let us know.
