Last quarter we ran the Q2 Canton developer survey, and a lot of you took the time to tell us exactly where building on Canton have friction. Here’s a recap of what the ecosystem shipped for builders in Q3, and how it maps to what you told us.
Useful developer facing tools from the Dev Fund with Milestones shipped.
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dpm trace (by Walnut): a transaction inspector that lives inside dpm. Point it at an update ID and get a readable event tree or add --visualize to click through it. It can also dry run a command before you submit, inspect a failed submission by its command ID, and diff what you prepared against what actually happened. Check Proposal
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daml-analyzer (by Certora): point it at a compiled .dar and it maps every cross-package interaction (which package creates, fetches or exercises choices in which other package), down to the file and line. Handy for security reviews and for making sense of third-party DARs you don’t have the source for. Check Proposal
Approved in the Dev Fund: worth keeping an eye on
These are funded and in progress, and a couple of them you can already try:
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canton-deploy (by LYNC): Hardhat-style deployment as a dpm component. Build, upload, vet, allocate parties and run setup scripts against LocalNet, DevNet, TestNet or MainNet from one config file with per-network profiles. Early versions are already usable. Check Proposal
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dAppBooster for Canton (by BootNode): takes you from Daml contracts to a running dApp on your laptop. One-command local Canton infrastructure, a React starter with wagmi-style hooks, and an end-to-end example that works with any CIP-0103 wallet. v0.1 is live today. Check Proposal
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Open-source reference wallet (by Digital Asset): a Splice Portfolio dApp UI and a browser-extension wallet with external parties, the Token Standard (CIP-0056) and the dApp Standard (CIP-0103) built in. A blueprint to copy from, instead of wiring every flow from scratch. Check Proposal
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Git-based DAR dependencies for dpm (by Moonsong Labs): declare Git-hosted DARs in daml.yaml and dpm fetches, caches and pins them to a commit SHA. No more download scripts or checked-in DARs. Being upstreamed into dpm. Check Proposal
Unified Docs + AI Assistant
The biggest piece of feedback we received was, “I couldn’t find X in the new docs.”
Our official documentation now has a built-in AI Assistant. Instead of hunting through pages, ask plain-language questions (e.g., “how do I onboard an external party?”) and get answers grounded directly in the docs, with a reference link.
Try it here: docs.canton.network
Dev Hub: The Complete Developer Tool Catalogue
A recurring theme in the survey was that it’s hard to know what already exists.
So we built the Dev Hub, a single catalogue of every tool on Canton, official and community-built: SDKs, references, analytics, wallet tooling and more. It includes an AI search that surfaces the exact tool you need based on what you want to build.
Browse it here: dev-hub.canton.foundation
Keep sharing your feedback
Everything above exists because builders shared it in the survey last quarter. The fastest way to shape what the ecosystem builds next is to keep the feedback coming. The Q3 survey will be out soon.
Thanks for building with us,
The Developer Relations Team, Canton