Canton (CC)

Designed around the requirements of financial institutions rather than an open retail market. Its distinguishing feature is the absence of one ledger everybody sees: each transaction is visible only to its parties, while a synchronisation protocol guarantees consistency across applications without exposing details to outsiders.

Logic is written in Daml, a language built by Digital Asset for expressing the rights and obligations of the parties to a deal. Applications stay independent — each keeps its own records and its own participants — yet they can execute a shared transaction atomically: the securities leg and the payment leg either both happen or neither does. That approach answers the main objection banks raise to public blockchains: having to show counterparties and volumes to the whole world.

The network's coin pays for node operation and cross-application synchronisation, playing the part gas fees play in open networks but inside a contour with a limited membership.

Privacy by default is the flip side of public verifiability: an outside observer cannot confirm what it is not allowed to see.