Participant node

A participant node is the piece of Canton infrastructure an organization actually runs to be on the network. It hosts one or more parties, the identities that sign contracts, and it executes and validates every Daml transaction those parties are involved in. Applications connect to a participant node's API to read their contracts and submit new transactions.

The defining property is selective storage. A participant node does not download the whole network's history the way a typical blockchain full node does. It receives and stores only the sub-transactions its hosted parties are entitled to see. Canton's privacy is enforced by this architecture: data other participants never receive is data they cannot leak.

Participant nodes talk to each other through synchronizers, which order and deliver encrypted messages between them without reading contract contents. A node can connect to several synchronizers at once, including the Global Synchronizer, letting its parties transact across many Canton applications from one piece of infrastructure.

Every validator in the Canton Coin economy runs a participant node; validator rewards compensate exactly this work of validating and confirming network activity.