Canton Upgrades Amid Accelerating Demand

TLDR: Canton Network participants seamlessly deliver major upgrade, further enhancing performance, throughput, and DevEx amid rapid growth

On Dec 10 2025, Canton Network seamlessly rolled out network enhancements amid accelerating demand. In under 24 hours, ~600 nodes transitioned seamlessly to Canton 3.4 and Splice 0.5.0 with minimal downtime and a high first-attempt success rate. 

This marks a step-change from July, when the network operated across ~200 nodes, reinforcing that Canton just works even as it grows rapidly in terms of participation, throughput and infrastructure. This upgrade underscores the network's focus on operational excellence and represents another significant step toward Canton’s evolution as a foundational network for onchain capital markets and payments - supporting sustained growth in network usage, application development, and institutional adoption as the network scales into 2026 and beyond.

Over the past year, network activity has accelerated sharply with leading financial institutions and crypto-native firms converging on shared regulatory-grade rails. Today, more than $350bn of onchain assets move across the network daily, a ~25% increase since last quarter, demonstrating the network’s rapidly expanding utility. 

Across the ecosystem, builders are reshaping capital markets, combining crypto-style velocity and composability, with privacy that works - enabling 24/7 financing, seamless collateral mobility, and private stablecoin payments on a unified, institutional-grade network. 

As the Canton Network builds on its technical advantages and broadens its partner and participant ecosystem this upgrade, approved by Super Validator vote, further strengthens performance, stability, security, and long-term scalability.

Super Validators collaborated closely during the upgrade to identify key optimizations that also enabled the upgrade to be completed 50% faster than originally projected.

In relation to the rollout, major crypto exchange ByBit commented:

"Canton Network's recent successful upgrade supports the increased usage of the network, and from an exchange perspective, the latest update was impressive given the breadth and rapid growth of Canton's ecosystem of apps and validators. As over 600 nodes implemented the latest software, our users were able to carry on as normal, demonstrating the maturity of the network's decentralized operations."

Andrei Pshenkin, Director of Engineering at leading wallet provider, Bron said: "Uptime is critical for our users and working with the Canton Network team means we can always rely on quick rollouts and great support."

What’s New?

The Canton 3.4 upgrade further improves speed, scalability and capacity of the Global Synchronizer, allowing the network to continue to address increasing demand.

At a high level, this includes:

• Performance: Faster, more efficient transaction processing
• Scalability: Supports more validators, dApps, and users without slowing down
• Cost Efficiency: Lower resource and transaction costs attract more network activity
• Developer Experience: Easier dApp management leads to more apps joining the ecosystem

Key Benefits

Increased Transaction Throughput Capability

• Canton 3.4 has sequencer processing efficiency improvements and optimizations to smart contract processing so the Global Synchronizer can handle more transactions per second (TPS)
• Better topology state validation improves transaction processing performance allowing validators to increase TPS throughput.

Better Scaling and Faster Onboarding

• Validators can join the network fast and with less computing strain, reducing bottlenecks and allowing the network to continue gaining more participants
• Improved user onboarding to allow for increased wallet creation throughput.

Lower Resource Requirements

• Only the latest package version of a dApp needs to be loaded
• Less memory use for validators means more parties can operate nodes cost-effectively, which supports network participation.

Developer Experience Improvements

• Developers can estimate transaction “cost” before execution. This lets them optimize smart contracts and workflows, possibly lowering the fees users pay
• A preview of “logical synchronizer upgrades” is included for testing, allowing future upgrades to further reduce downtime and limit risk of stalled transactions for continuous operations
• Improved complex dApp version history handling
• Safer package vetting/unvetting
• Improved package selection logic.

Ready to start building on Canton Network?

Take advantage of the latest features in Canton 3.4 today and start creating institutional-grade, highly composable applications for 24/7 on-chain capital markets, payments and institutional DeFi:

1. Read 3.4 release notes for Splice 0.5.0
2. Learn more about the motivations behind the network upgrade in CIP-89
3. See different ways to participate and get started here
4. Accelerate your Canton application development with Quickstart here