Overview

An application on the Canton Network is defined by the kind of APIs it integrates with. We explain all the APIs available from the Global Synchronizer and a validator node here.

At a high-level, we can distinguish between the following two kinds of apps:

• Read-Only Apps: these apps build functionality by using read-only APIs, and thus cannot mutate the ledger.

• Daml Apps: these apps integrate directly or indirectly with the Ledger API to create new contracts or exercise choices on the ledger to drive on-ledger workflows.

You can find more information in the following sub-sections:

• Read-Only Apps
• Daml Apps
  • Architecture
  • Ledger Ingestion

• Version Information
• Splice App APIs
  • OpenAPI Specifications
  • API Stability
  • Contract Payload Encoding
  • Authentication