Overview

Canton is a public blockchain built for regulated finance with privacy and compliance built in. DTCC is bringing tokenized U.S. Treasuries onto it and Broadridge settles repo trades on it.

Canton’s model is different from most blockchains:

• Every party, Canton's version of an account, has to be hosted by a validator node, which sees & confirms that party's transactions
• Transactions are private to the parties involved
• If a validator node goes down, that stops that party being able to interact with the network
• So, for any institution on Canton, key decisions are:
  • Who hosts our party: our own validator, or a specialist Node-as-a-Service provider like Validation Cloud?
  • How do we avoid one validator being a single point of failure?

Who are BitSafe?

BitSafe is the team behind CBTC, a Bitcoin-backed token that was the first non-native asset on Canton. CBTC has run on a Decentralized Party on Canton Mainnet since 2025 and has processed over 10 million transactions.

DecMan is the tooling BitSafe built to run CBTC across independent operators. The Canton Foundation funded its open-source release with a Development Fund grant of 8.5M Canton Coin (over $1M at the time), and the code has been audited by Quantstamp. Any app on Canton can now use it.

More about DecMan

DecMan (Decentralization Manager) is designed to solve the problem of a Canton party on one validator being a single point of failure.

DecMan lets several independent operators host & govern one Canton party together. Each operator runs DecMan alongside its own Canton node, and the copies coordinate with each other over an encrypted peer-to-peer connection. Through DecMan the group can:

• Create a Decentralized Party & deploy its governance contracts to every host
• Add or remove operators & change how many approvals are needed
• Add extra operators to a party an institution already controls with its own keys (co-validation)

Transactions on a Decentralized Party need confirmations from a set number of its hosts, e.g. 2 of 3. If one operator goes offline the party keeps working and no single operator can act for it.

BitSafe and Validation Cloud partnership

After using Validation Cloud’s Canton validator for CBTC, BitSafe invited Validation Cloud in July into the first group of operators for its Decentralization Manager (DecMan) network on Canton Mainnet.

Apps & institutions building on Canton can now add Validation Cloud as one of the independent operators that host & govern their Decentralized Party, providing our institutional-grade validator hosting paired with the additional resiliency of DecMan.

"Institutions on Canton need their mission-critical parties to keep running. Relying on multiple validators is the way forward and DecMan provides an elegant and proven solution to run a high availability multi-operator setup. At Validation Cloud, we are always raising the bar on delivering the best institutional grade infrastructure to our client and we're excited to be one of the launch operators that institutions can choose in their DecMan Canton setup." says Emmanuel Marchal, Validation Cloud’s Chief Revenue Officer.

How to use DecMan and Validation Cloud on Canton

In addition to Validation Cloud being one of Canton’s approved Node-as-a-Service (NaaS) operators, if you want to include DecMan:

• Ask for Validation Cloud by name when you’re discussing your Canton set up with BitSafe
• Talk to us directly. We’re happy to advise on your setup and explain DecMan. Contact us at validationcloud.io/contact.

Further Reading:

CBTC: CBTC from BitSafe, DTCC: DTCC Turns Tokenization into Reality, Broadridge: DLR Transacts $1 Trillion a Month.