1.1 Core Goals and Design Principles
The technical implementation of a multi-chain Decentralized Finance (DeFi) vault system leveraging Canton Network is predicated on resolving the fundamental conflict institutions face: the need to maintain stringent, auditable governance and data privacy while engaging with the highly liquid, permissionless execution environments of public blockchains.
The reference architecture achieves this via a crucial Hybrid Execution Paradigm:
- Canton serves as the confidential Policy and Control Plane, enforcing institutional roles, complex governance, and strategy computation
- Public EVM and Rust chains function purely as the Execution Layer, accessing protocols for yield optimization and liquidity
High-Level Goals
The design is guided by the following core objectives:
1. Private and Auditable Governance
Maintaining private and auditable policy and governance for vault strategies, utilizing Canton's ledger model to record immutable approvals.
2. Reliable Cross-Chain Execution
Executing on-chain rebalances and cross-protocol operations reliably across multiple public chains.
3. Atomic Cross-Domain Operations
Providing atomic and consistent cross-domain operations, ensuring that workflows spanning multiple chains do not result in partial state updates.
4. Institutional Role Support
Supporting institutional roles (e.g., approver, risk officer, operator) and compliance requirements in a strictly permissioned environment.
5. Strategy Data Privacy
Minimizing leakage of private strategy data by only publishing cryptographically verifiable outputs of the policy decision—the minimal necessary data—onto public chains.
Design Philosophy
The architecture follows these key principles:
- Separation of Concerns: Policy decisions are completely separate from execution
- Data Minimization: Only essential execution instructions reach public chains
- Cryptographic Verification: All cross-layer communications are cryptographically signed
- Auditability: Every decision is recorded immutably on Canton's ledger
- Flexibility: Support for multiple bridge patterns and custody solutions