IRSForge
Privacy-first on-chain Interest Rate Swaps on Canton Network.
Canton Network settles roughly $9T a month on-chain across tokenized treasuries, repo, and private credit. None of that book is hedged on-chain today. There is no Bloomberg SWPM equivalent, no MARS, no IRS infrastructure. Hedging means breaking the chain, settling somewhere else, and reconciling two ledgers. IRSForge closes that gap. The UI is SWPM-shaped: same leg composer, same cashflows / risk / scenario tabs, same blotter, same CSA ladder. A non-technical user who already runs SWPM should feel at home in minutes. The on-chain layer is plumbing, not a new paradigm to learn. See SWPM / MARS parity for the feature-by-feature map. Any Canton participant edits one YAML file, plugs in their own OIDC, oracle, and topology, and deploys. The seam is the same one the in-tree NY Fed SOFR provider and demo stub use. Bringing your own data is documented and additive, not a fork.
Background
Interest rate swaps are the largest derivatives market in the world by notional, yet the post-trade workflow still runs on faxes, CSV reconciliation, and multi-day margin call disputes. Canton Network is the first ledger where regulated counterparties can actually run a real ISDA lifecycle on-chain with privacy preserved per participant. IRSForge is an open-source reference implementation of the full IRS workflow on Canton, built so any participant can fork it, point it at their own node, and bring real swap booking on-chain with minimal effort.
Key Benefits
- Both counterparties see the same swap, the same fixings, and the same NPV in real time. No T+1 reconciliation.
- Margin calls settle in seconds. Disputes carry a full on-ledger paper trail.
- Regulators get a read-only lifecycle timeline without bilateral data requests.
- Configurable topology: single sandbox for demos, multi-participant for production.
- Pluggable auth (demo party selector or real OIDC) and pluggable oracle providers.
- Built on Daml Finance library types, so it composes with other Canton apps instead of living in a silo.
Why Canton
Canton is the only ledger that solves the privacy-versus-finality problem for regulated derivatives. Each participant runs its own node, sees only what it is authorized to see, and yet shares a single source of truth with its counterparty. No other chain lets a bank book a swap with another bank, give the regulator selective oversight, and keep both books opaque to the wider network. Daml Finance gives us production-grade primitives for holdings, settlement, and lifecycle, so we built on top of the library rather than reinventing it.
What Makes It Unique
Most Canton work today targets tokenisation or RWA issuance. IRSForge tackles the back-office business workflow itself, which is where TradFi actually bleeds operational cost. We ship the full ISDA lifecycle (issuance, fixings, settlement, mark-to-market, margin calls with disputes, termination) wired to a Bloomberg-style trader workspace, an operator console, and a regulator oversight console. Everything is open source. It is the only reference implementation of derivatives back-office on Canton that a counterparty can pick up and adapt without forking a half-finished demo.
What's Included
- Daml contracts for the full IRS lifecycle: Swap, Margin, CSA, Oracle, Setup, with per-family proposal/accept patterns
- Daml Finance library integration across holdings, settlement, lifecycle
- TypeScript oracle service for curve publication and rate fixings
- Next.js 16 + React 19 frontend: blotter, trader workspace, CSA pair view, operator console, regulator oversight, audit timeline, on-chain activity feed
- Auth service with demo mode and OIDC for production
- Shared pricing engine: NPV, par rate, mod-duration, FpML adapter
- Marketing site at irsforge.com and Docusaurus public docs at docs.irsforge.com
- Live demo at demo.irsforge.com with auto-deploy via GitHub Actions
- Public repository at http://github.com/sneg55/irsforge
Behind the Scenes
The codebase splits into eight independent build boundaries (contracts, oracle, frontend, shared-config, shared-pricing, auth, site, docs-site), each with its own build pipeline so contributors can work on one without rebuilding the rest. Daml SDK 2.10 with the full Daml Finance v4 stack; library types are used directly rather than reimplemented. The frontend talks to Canton over JSON API v1 with WebSocket streaming for live ledger updates. A push-driven mark publisher coalesces accept events into a single debounced tick, so margin calls fire about a second after settlement instead of waiting for a cron. CSA pair state is canonicalised so swaps proposed in either party order net into the same collateral envelope. Regulators are first-class observers on every relevant template, with Daml-level tests proving they cannot see what they should not. CI/CD ships site and docs to Cloudflare Pages and the live demo to Hetzner on every push to main.
Impact
The goal is adoption, not vanity metrics. IRSForge is a working, documented, deployed reference that lowers the barrier for the next Canton participant who wants to bring derivatives on-chain. Repo public. Docs public. Demo live. If one counterparty pair forks it and books their first internal test swap on Canton, the project has done its job. The bigger picture: rates derivatives are the natural hedge for the trillions in repo and treasury activity already moving on-chain, and today they have effectively zero on-chain footprint. A clean reference implementation is the cheapest way to close that gap.
