Introduction

Welcome

Welcome to our Canton Public Data API.

This API is designed to make Canton data easier to consume, easier to reason about, and easier to build on.

Whether you are building a wallet experience, an analytics dashboard, a reporting workflow, or a real-time integration, the goal is the same: give you a clean way to work with meaningful Canton activity through a simple HTTP interface.

With the Canton API, you can retrieve update history, balances, prices, transfers, rewards, identity data, ANS records, contract details, and real-time streams without having to work directly with low-level ledger structures.

Some Initial Concepts

Canton has its own mental model, so a few concepts look different from what you may be used to on EVM and other ecosystems.

• A wallet address becomes a party.
• A transaction becomes an update.
• The native asset is CC, or Canton Coin.
• Underneath, the chain is UTXO-based (same as Bitcoin), and employs a custom functional programming language (Daml) for smart contract development.

Privacy First

One of Canton's defining properties is privacy. Unlike many public chains, Canton does not expose one global transaction feed that anyone can index in full. Data visibility depends on which parties are involved in an update (transaction).

That has an important consequence: public data APIs, such as this one, only cover the public portion of network activity, not every update on the network.

Most notably, Canton Coin (CC) transfers are publicly visible. Many other asset transfers and contract interactions are only visible to the parties and witnesses involved.

Getting Access to Private Data

If you need visibility into private activity from your own Canton environment, public APIs are not enough by design. Private Canton data is only available to the parties and witnesses entitled to see it.

For that use case, Noves offers the Noves Data App for Canton, a self-hosted product that runs in your own environment and gives you the same Noves-style data UX on top of your node's data. Deployment details and source materials are available in the canton-data-app repository.

A Good Place To Start

If you are integrating Noves APIs for the first time, a simple path looks like this:

1. Call GET /chains.
2. Call GET /{chain}/updates/{party} for the party you care about.
3. Add GET /{chain}/balances/{party} if you also want a balance view.
4. Add GET /{chain}/transfers/{party} or GET /{chain}/rewards/{party} if your product needs a more focused lens.
5. Add POST /{chain}/streams once polling the API from your end is no longer fast or performant enough.

A Few Practical Notes

Endpoints require an API key. The API accepts the key through the apiKey header, and it also accepts apiKey as a query parameter.

Pagination is cursor-based on the larger list endpoints. When a response includes nextPageUrl, that is the easiest way to fetch the next page.