Privacy on Canton

Most public blockchains achieve consensus by broadcasting every transaction to every node, making privacy an afterthought handled by mixers or off-chain workarounds. Canton inverts the model. The network's Daml foundation records who is party to each contract, and the ledger distributes each piece of a transaction only to the participant nodes hosting those entitled parties. Everyone else never receives the data at all.

This is called sub-transaction privacy because the boundary is drawn within a transaction, not just around it. A settlement chain that touches several applications can reveal each leg strictly to that leg's parties: an issuer sees the issuance, a trading venue sees the trade, and neither sees the other's business. Synchronizers, which order messages between participants, work on encrypted payloads and do not read contract contents.

The design is why regulated institutions can use a shared public network at all; broadcasting positions and client flows would be commercially and legally untenable. For OneSwap users, it means trading activity on Canton is not an open book the way it is on fully transparent chains, while settlement remains verifiable between the parties involved.