If you've been building in crypto long enough, you know the moment when the wallet experience on a network goes from "interesting" to "okay I can actually build using this." It's usually when the right tooling arrives at the protocol layer.
That is exactly where Canton is right now.
The Canton Network has seen rapid growth over the past year, now processing over $350bn+ in onchain assets daily and supporting an ever expanding ecosystem of wallets, custody providers, and applications. In the last 6 months, average daily users have more than tripled, alongside a surge of new applications providing institutions access to Canton’s 24/7 privacy-preserving programmable markets.
As this growth accelerates, the developer experience around wallets becomes critical. Application builders need reliable ways to connect to wallets, support different custody models, and manage signing flows on a privacy-first network.
That’s why we’re introducing Canton’s complete wallet stack for developers. It provides the core developer tooling needed to integrate existing wallets into Canton applications, build new Canton-native wallets, and enable users to interact with applications through the wallet of their choice.
On public blockchains like Ethereum, wallet connectivity is relatively straightforward: you prove you own a key, sign a message, and the application can verify your state on a transparent ledger.
Canton is fundamentally different. It is built around a privacy-first architecture where data is shared only with the parties involved in a transaction. Validators only hold data for their hosted parties. Your party, Canton’s equivalent of an account address, lives on a specific validator, and that validator stores your data, participates in consensus on your behalf, and exposes the Ledger API. Without a validator hosting your party, you don’t exist on the network.
This architecture is what makes Canton suitable for real-world financial markets, but it also means wallet integration requires more than just key ownership. Two separate things need to happen for every transaction: validator access (you need to access the validator hosting your party) and transaction signing (someone must hold the keys and authorize the transaction).
For institutions, these two capabilities often live in completely different systems.
For wallets
For app builders
You need a mediation layer that maintains Canton's strict privacy guarantees while still giving developers and users a seamless experience, and that gives institutions the flexibility to plug in their own signing infrastructure without rebuilding everything from scratch. That's exactly what this new stack was built to solve.
Who is it for? For teams integrating Canton with wallets and exchanges
@canton-network/wallet-sdk: Our Wallet SDK is the core developer toolkit for institutions, wallets, and exchanges that want to integrate with Canton. It is designed to simplify development by offering a streamlined, TypeScript SDK for interacting with the ledger. The SDK includes the methods needed to perform common wallet operations like creating parties, preparing and sending transactions, and supporting other core workflows.
Instead of every partner building their own custom bespoke integration, they use a clean and consistent developer interface. Whether you are a wallet provider, an exchange, or an institution building a custom integration, Wallet SDK is your entry point for reading and writing to Canton.
Get started with Wallet SDK here.
Who is it for? For developers building Canton applications, and wallet providers supporting dApps
@canton-network/dapp-sdk:This is your entry point as a frontend developer. It enables you to integrate once to connect to any CIP-0103 compatible app or wallet - without custom integrations for each provider. This helps to increase user onboarding conversion as users can connect through their preferred custody methods.
The dApp SDK is the application-side implementation of this standard. It includes a discovery component, a TypeScript component that application developers can integrate into their frontend, that provides an out-of-the-box “Connect Wallet” experience. This UI allows users to view all supported wallets and connect instantly. If you’ve used RainbowKit on Ethereum, this user interaction will feel familiar.
On the wallet side, providers implement the dApp API to become CIP-0103 compliant. Once a wallet supports the standard, it is automatically surfaced in the discovery component of every CIP-0103-enabled dApp. No bespoke app integration work is required.
The SDK supports both synchronous approaches (e.g. browser extension wallets) and asynchronous approaches (e.g. server based institutional integrations), allowing it to accommodates a wide range of wallet architectures without exposing the complexity to the application developer
For dApp developers, this SDK is your primary integration point: integrate once and your application can interact with every compliant wallet - whether that’s a browser extension, an enterprise custody setup behind a Wallet Gateway, or anything in between.
Get started with dApp SDK here.
Who is it for? For institutions that want to bring their own validator whilst using an institutional custody provider.
The Wallet Gateway eliminates a major integration burden for institutions. Without it, institutions would need to build and maintain a custom bridge between their own validator and custody provider, and an implementation of the dApp API - a process that can take months of engineering effort and slow down dApp adoption.
On Canton, transactions require both a validator (which hosts your party and submits transactions to the network) and a signing system (which holds private keys and authorizes transactions). For retail users with a browser wallet, these live in the same place. For institutions, they do not. A bank running its own validator may rely on Fireblocks or BitGo for key management, with HSMs, multi-signature approval policies, and audit trails that they are not going to replace.
Wallet Gateway is deployed in the institution’s own environment, alongside their validator. It acts as the connection layer between the validator and trusted signing systems through configurable signing drivers. When a transaction needs to be signed, the Gateway takes the unsigned transaction from the validator, routes it to the configured signing provider to follow policy workflows and get signed, gets the signed transaction back, and returns it to the validator for submission.
Critically, the Wallet Gateway enables the bring-your-own-validator model for application connectivity. It allows users and organizations to connect to any CIP-0103 compliant dApp using their preferred validator and their preferred signing provider. From the dApp’s perspective, a user connecting through a Wallet Gateway looks identical to a user connecting through a browser extension wallet. The CIP-0103 standard handles the abstraction.
Get started with Wallet Gateway here.
Imagine a global hotel chain that accepts every major credit card. The hotel doesn’t need to know whether you bank with JPMorgan or Deutsche Bank, whether your card is corporate or personal, or the approval policies behind it. The hotel just simply integrates with a standard payment terminal. You tap your card, and the transaction goes through.
In this analogy, the hotel is a Canton dApp built with the dApp SDK. It integrates once with the payments standard - CIP-0103 - and can accept every compliant wallet without any additional work. The payment terminal and the card network are the equivalent of the Wallet SDK and CIP-0103 standard. They define the shared protocol that both sides speak so that any compliant wallet connects with any compliant dApp.
For a regular traveler, the experience is simple: tap a personal credit card and pay instantly. That's like using a browser extension wallet, where keys and signing happen locally on the device.
But for a corporate traveler, it’s different. They’re not really just “tapping a card” directly. Behind the scenes, the transaction is routed through their company’s treasury system, checked against its approval policies, and processed through their corporate banking and custody setup before it is authorized.
The infrastructure that connects the company’s internal systems to the standard global payment network is analogous to the Wallet Gateway. It sits within the institution’s own environment, connecting their validator and custody provider to the standard protocol used by dApps.
The hotel, the traveler, and the corporate treasury team all built their systems independently. Yet they are able to seamlessly work together because they all speak the same standard.
Integrating Canton with Wallets and Exchanges? Get started with Wallet SDK
Building Canton applications or supporting dApps as a wallet provider? Get started with dApp SDK
Want to connect your own validator to a signing provider? Get started with Wallet Gateway
Ready to start building on Canton? View our SDK docs here