CIP 0065 Add Layer Zero, Wormhole, and Chainlink as SVs at Weight 4 each

Abstract

• Add Layer Zero, Wormhole, and Chainlink as SVs at Weight 3 each

• Create a bonus pool of Weight 5

Motivation

Building cross-chain bridges is difficult to do well. There are large investments in engineering, testing, and security audits to get it right. Accordingly, each bridge operator should be fairly compensated for their investment to connect to Canton.

In addition, it is common for one bridge to be considered the ‘preferred’ option of the chain. This can sometimes be expressed by giving that bridge the right to use the common name form of the bridged asset. For example, the ‘preferred’ version of bridged ETH on Canton could be referenced as ETH as opposed to ETH.link (Chainlink bridged ETH). In Canton, we have the option to grant the ETH Canton Naming Service registration to one of the bridges and that would create a similar outcome.

In this CIP, all three bridge options are being offered equivalent deals for supporting Canton. This CIP also introduces incentives for the bridge that deploys to production first and the one that hits scale first.

About Applicants in their own words:

Chainlink

• Chainlink is the global standard for connecting blockchains to real-world data, other blockchains, governments, and enterprise systems. Chainlink powers critical use cases across DeFi, banking, tokenized real world assets (RWAs), cross-chain, and more, and is widely adopted by major financial institutions, national governments, and top DeFi protocols, including Swift, DTCC, Monetary Authority of Singapore, Euroclear, Central Bank of Brazil, Fidelity International, UBS, Aave, GMX, Lido, and many more.

• In the Web3 space The Chainlink platform has operated in production for over half a decade and has secured over $75B+ in DeFi TVL at its peak and has enabled over $20 trillion in transaction value enabled as of March 2025. With 300+ engineers and dedicated monitoring teams, Chainlink Labs is uniquely positioned to offer the depth of support and execution strength needed to operate secure cross-chain and data systems at scale.

• In the Web3 space, Chainlink secures 92% of total value secured by general purpose oracles, enables 71% of the total DeFi Transaction Value secured by general purpose oracles and powers 55% of DeFi protocols secured by general purpose oracles. Chainlink also powers the biggest DeFi projects, including Aave, Spark, Compound, Venus, dYdX, GMX, etc, and has been integrated with more than 50 public/permissioned blockchain networks.

• Leading DeFi applications and regulated financial institutions alike are already using Chainlink’s offerings in key deployments, making it a widely used platform in DeFi and capital markets today.

Layer Zero

• LayerZero Labs, is the leading blockchain infrastructure provider for cross-chain interoperability, allowing data and digital assets to move seamlessly and securely across blockchains. More than 300 omnichain applications are built on LayerZero’s immutable, censorship resistant and permissionless messaging protocol, which has executed over 140 million transactions and has secured in excess of $200 billion in value.

• LayerZero Labs is proposing to develop and support an Endpoint for the Canton network, ensuring full integration with the LayerZero mesh network of 125+ blockchains and fully supported OFT and OApp contract interfaces for assets and applications issued on the Canton network.

• LayerZero will deploy and integrate an Endpoint on Canton, providing full messaging capabilities and standardised interoperability between private Canton instances, the public Canton network and the broader LayerZero ecosystem.

• By leveraging the Omnichain Fungible Token (OFT) and Omnichain Application (OApp) contract interfaces and the extensive experience in secure smart contract development, LayerZero Labs offers a robust, scalable, and compliant solution tailored to meet the requirements of the Canton Network builders in financial services.

• The OFT Standard has multiple benefits, including 1/ it simplifies liquidity management, 2/ eliminates fragmentation, and 3/ offers elastic scalability across a wide range of secondary markets and supports the distribution of assets and the unified communication of applications across systems.

• Today, LayerZero is utilized in production by industry leaders such as Ondo Finance, PayPal, USDT0, BitGo, Paxos and many others, showcasing its ability to meet security and compliance requirements at scale. With a proven track record of accounting for over 70% of cross-chain industry messaging volume in 2024, LayerZero Labs is committed to providing a best in class experience to the Canton Network, its members, and users.

Wormhole Labs

• Wormhole is the leading interoperability platform connecting traditional finance and the internet economy

• Interoperability provider for:

  • Securitize

  • Uniswap

  • Lido

  • Sky

  • Agora

  • Transfero

  • M^0

• Stats:

  •  

    $55b of value secured by NTT

  •  

    1b messages sent

  •  

    200 applications using Wormhole

  •  

    6 runtimes supported

  •  

    30 blockchains supported

Deliverables for full SV Reward

To be inserted separately as a Markdown table upon request.

SV Mechanics

• An ‘representative’ SV will be setup by the GSF with an SV Weight at the maximum earnable weight in this CIP

  • The Applicant is responsible for all costs associated with the operation of the representative SV

  • The representative SV will NOT mint rewards on a block by block basis

  • All representative SV rewards will go to the Unclaimed Rewards pool

• Applicant is required to present proof of successful completed milestones to the Tokenomics Working Group

  • Applicant is required to present a calculation for number of Canton Coin it should earn for meeting the requirements of the milestone

• If the Tokenomics Working Group agrees the milestone has been met and agrees with the calculation, an announcement will be sent via the Tokenomics-Announce mailing List

  • 2/3 of Super Validator Operators will then assign a portion of the Unclaimed Rewards to be minted by the Applicant’s Validator

  • 2/3 of the Super Validator Operators will update their configurations to allow Applicant to takeover a portion of their SV Weight on a go-forward basis

• If any milestones and associated rewards are not achieved by the deadline:

  • Applicant will be notified they have not met a deliverable by the GSF

  • Remaining SV Weight on the representative SV will be removed from the SV Operator configs

  • The Tokenomics Working Group will make a recommendation to the SVs on what to do with the Unclaimed Rewards

• Applicant is subject to CIP-0045: SV Operating Requirements

  • If, at any time, the Applicant has been rewarded SV Weight > 2.5, they are required to operate their SV within 6 months of crossing that Weight

Copyright

• This CIP is licensed under CC0-1.0: Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal.

Changelog

• 2025-06-02: Updated draft to reflect revised weights, bonus pool, and incentive mechanisms.