About
The Canton Foundationβs mission is to foster the development and growth of the Global Synchronizer in the Canton Network and facilitate its governance.
Note on Prize Distribution The prize pools above show the allocated budget per track, not a guaranteed number of winners. We reserve the right to redistribute prizes across tracks based on the overall quality of submissions.
For example: if Track 3 (Payments & Neobanking) receives two outstanding projects but Track 4 (Agentic Commerce) has no standout submission, we will award both projects in Track 3 and reallocate Track 4's budget accordingly. Conversely, if a track receives no qualifying submissions, its pool may be redistributed to reward exceptional work elsewhere.
Our priority is to reward the best work, not to fill prize slots. Tracks 1β3 are our primary focus and will be judged most rigorously. Track 4 is a bonus track i.e strong submissions there will be rewarded, but the bar for Tracks 1β3 is higher and the budgets reflect that. The total prize pool of $10,000 USDC will be fully distributed across the strongest projects.
Prizes
Build financial primitives where privacy is a first feature, not an afterthought. Canton's sub-transaction privacy means counterparties never see each other's positions, exposure, or order flow.
Build something like:
- Private perpetuals DEX: traders' positions and P&L invisible to other participants until settlement
- Confidential margin management: bilateral collateral agreements where only the two counterparties see exposure
- Dark pool order matching: institutional-grade order books where order flow is hidden from non-participants
- Private lending protocol: loan terms visible only to lender and borrower, invisible to other depositors
Qualification Requirements
1. Deployed on Canton DevNet Live on Canton DevNet via Seaport by 5North. no need to run your own validator.
2. Meaningful Daml Usage Contracts written in Daml (no EVM wrappers), implementing logic that requires Canton's privacy model with correct signatories, observers, and controllers.
3. Open Source Repo Public GitHub repo i.e another developer must be able to build and run it from the README alone.
4. Demo and Documentation
- README must cover: setup, privacy model (who sees what and why), architecture overview, and known limitations.
- Demo video (2β5 min): show the core user journey and switch between party perspectives live to demonstrate data visibility differences.
5. Functional UI
- Preferred: web dApp at a public URL (Vercel, Netlify, GitHub Pages) showing which party the user is acting as and visible data differences between parties.
- Accepted: CLI with clear party-level output separation and sample output in the README.
Links and Resources
Bring real-world financial instruments on-chain with the compliance, privacy, and settlement guarantees that institutions actually require.
Build something like:
- Tokenized bond issuance with private investor registry β cap table visible only to issuer and each individual holder
- Repo agreement automation β PvP settlement with confidential bilateral terms between counterparties
- Private equity secondary market β transfer restrictions and investor accreditation enforced in Daml, deal terms private
- Supply chain finance with selective disclosure β invoices visible only to the financing bank and the relevant supplier
- Confidential trade finance β LC workflows where importer, exporter, and bank each see only their portion
Qualification Requirements
1. Deployed on Canton DevNet Live on Canton DevNet via Seaport by 5North. no need to run your own validator.
2. Meaningful Daml Usage Contracts written in Daml (no EVM wrappers), implementing logic that requires Canton's privacy model with correct signatories, observers, and controllers.
3. Open Source Repo Public GitHub repo i.e another developer must be able to build and run it from the README alone.
4. Demo and Documentation
- README must cover: setup, privacy model (who sees what and why), architecture overview, and known limitations.
- Demo video (2β5 min): show the core user journey and switch between party perspectives live to demonstrate data visibility differences.
5. Functional UI
- Preferred: web dApp at a public URL (Vercel, Netlify, GitHub Pages) showing which party the user is acting as and visible data differences between parties.
- Accepted: CLI with clear party-level output separation and sample output in the README.
Links and Resources
Build payment infrastructure and financial services where privacy is the default not a premium feature.
Build something like:
- Privacy-preserving cross-border payment: sender and receiver amounts hidden from other network participants
- Neobank on Canton: multi-party account management where each customer's balance is invisible to others
- Stablecoin-based treasury management: corporate cash pooling with subsidiary-level privacy from parent visibility
Qualification Requirements
1. Deployed on Canton DevNet Live on Canton DevNet via Seaport by 5North. no need to run your own validator.
2. Meaningful Daml Usage Contracts written in Daml (no EVM wrappers), implementing logic that requires Canton's privacy model with correct signatories, observers, and controllers.
3. Open Source Repo Public GitHub repo i.e another developer must be able to build and run it from the README alone.
4. Demo and Documentation
- README must cover: setup, privacy model (who sees what and why), architecture overview, and known limitations.
- Demo video (2β5 min): show the core user journey and switch between party perspectives live to demonstrate data visibility differences.
5. Functional UI
- Preferred: web dApp at a public URL (Vercel, Netlify, GitHub Pages) showing which party the user is acting as and visible data differences between parties.
- Accepted: CLI with clear party-level output separation and sample output in the README.
Links and Resources
Build autonomous financial workflows where AI agents transact, settle, and manage assets on behalf of users with every constraint encoded in Daml, not enforced by middleware.
Build something like:
- Autonomous subscription billing engine: agent uses Canton's native
SubscriptionInitialPaymentand renewal contracts to autonomously collect recurring payments without per-transaction approval - Agent-orchestrated syndicated payment: an AI coordinator agent splits a single payment obligation across multiple counterparty validators atomically, where each recipient only sees their leg of the transaction
- Private AI-to-AI commerce with sub-transaction isolation: two agents from different organizations transact where each agent's validator only sees its own party's view, enforced at the protocol level not by middleware
Qualification Requirements
1. Deployed on Canton DevNet Live on Canton DevNet via Seaport by 5North. no need to run your own validator.
2. Meaningful Daml Usage Contracts written in Daml (no EVM wrappers), implementing logic that requires Canton's privacy model with correct signatories, observers, and controllers.
3. Open Source Repo Public GitHub repo i.e another developer must be able to build and run it from the README alone.
4. Demo and Documentation
- README must cover: setup, privacy model (who sees what and why), architecture overview, and known limitations.
- Demo video (2β5 min): show the core user journey and switch between party perspectives live to demonstrate data visibility differences.
5. Functional UI
- Preferred: web dApp at a public URL (Vercel, Netlify, GitHub Pages) showing which party the user is acting as and visible data differences between parties.
- Accepted: CLI with clear party-level output separation and sample output in the README.
