Until April 30, 2026, validators on @CantonNetwork could earn $CC simply by being online. That changed with CIP-0096. Liveness rewards were phased out entirely. Validators that process no transactions now earn no $CC through passive availability, their economics are tied directly to the activity their hosted applications generate on the network.
The shift reflects something consistent throughout Canton's tokenomics: the network is moving from rewarding participation to rewarding contribution. In the bootstrapping phase, Super Validators received 80% of newly minted $CC to prioritize infrastructure establishment. That has since shifted to 62% for application providers, 18% for validators, and 20% for Super Validators, a distribution that continues moving toward applications through Canton's first decade.
The principle is the same throughout: minting rights follow real network utility, not presence. An application provider that also operates its own validator can capture both the app rewards from the app pool and the validator rewards from the validator pool on the same transaction flow, making the most economically efficient model one where infrastructure and application growth are aligned.
The full picture is in Blog #1 of our Understanding Canton series:
Zth.
