Every blockchain governance system eventually confronts its own chicken-and-egg problems. Canton Network found one in the transfer preapproval mechanism and addressed it directly. CIP-0119, approved in 2026, introduces a free 90-day base duration for transfer preapprovals, removing an upfront cost that was blocking new participants from joining the network at all.
The Problem It Solves
Transfer preapprovals are a prerequisite for receiving Canton Coin from most exchanges. Before an exchange will send CC to a party, that party must have a preapproval enabled. Before CIP-0119, enabling a preapproval required paying a CC fee proportional to its duration. That created a contradiction: to receive CC from an exchange, you first needed to hold CC to pay for the preapproval that makes receiving CC possible.
This bootstrapping problem became more acute after CIP-0096 removed validator liveness rewards. New validators onboarding to the network had no reliable path to acquire their first CC without already holding some. Exchanges were the natural source, but exchanges required preapprovals, and preapprovals required CC. The loop had no entry point.
What CIP-0119 Changes
The proposal introduces a new configuration parameter, transferPreapprovalBaseDuration, set by default to 90 days, inside AmuletConfig. Transfer preapproval creation and renewal now charges only for duration beyond that base. Creating a preapproval with an expiry within 90 days, or renewing one to extend expiry by up to 90 days, costs nothing beyond standard traffic fees. Those traffic fees can themselves be covered by the network's free base traffic rate, meaning the entire operation can be completed at zero CC cost.
Preapprovals longer than 90 days still require CC fees, as before. That boundary is not arbitrary. The original fee structure existed to protect Super Validator nodes from being burdened with very long-lived preapprovals. CIP-0119's rationale is precise on this point: for preapprovals under 90 days, traffic costs alone provide sufficient protection against overloading the network. For longer durations, the fee structure remains intact. The design does not eliminate the protection. It just confines it to where it is actually needed.
Backwards Compatibility
CIP-0119 requires a Daml change, but the implementation is structured to avoid disruption. As long as the new transferPreapprovalBaseDuration field is not explicitly set, meaning the default of 90 days applies, the change permits downgrades of all Daml contracts and is fully backwards compatible. Validator nodes that have not yet upgraded will continue paying preapproval fees for the full duration under the previous rules until they adopt the new code.
The change ships with Splice 0.6.9. Validators that upgrade will automatically benefit from the free base duration on new and renewed preapprovals.
Why This Matters
The bootstrapping problem CIP-0119 resolves is a category of friction that does not show up in benchmarks or technical specifications. It shows up when a new validator tries to join the network and discovers they cannot complete the setup sequence without already being on the network. That kind of barrier tends to be invisible to participants who joined early and obvious to everyone who comes after.
Removing it requires identifying the specific mechanism creating the problem, in this case the fee structure on short-duration preapprovals, and adjusting it precisely enough that the fix does not create new vulnerabilities. CIP-0119 does that. The 90-day threshold is not cosmetic; it is the point at which traffic costs become a sufficient substitute for CC fees as a protection mechanism.
With this change, a new validator can arrive, create a preapproval through free traffic costs alone, receive CC from an exchange, and proceed with normal network participation. The entry point that did not exist before now does.
