Financial institutions are increasingly exploring distributed ledger infrastructure for real-world financial applications. But as smart contracts become more interconnected and privacy-sensitive, understanding exactly how systems behave before deployment becomes essential.

To help address that challenge, Certora has been awarded a grant from the Canton Development Fund to build a new open-source static analysis tool for Daml projects on the Canton Network.

The initiative expands Certora’s ongoing work in making smart contract behavior fully transparent and machine-verifiable, bringing that same rigor to institutions building multi-party applications on Canton.

Bringing Visibility to Cross-Package Interactions

The new tool will analyze compiled .dar files, Canton’s compiled smart contract packages, to detect and visualize cross-package interactions, one of the most complex and difficult aspects of multi-party smart contract systems.

Specifically, the tool will identify every instance where one package has the authority to call into another, including detailed references such as source file paths and exact line numbers.

Tracing the full supply chain of each Daml contract is critical for understanding the privacy implications of interacting with a smart contract on Canton. In Canton’s privacy-first architecture, unintended information disclosure can carry significant consequences. Certora’s tool aims to automate the analysis enterprises need before deploying or interacting with a Daml contract.

Reducing Complexity for Security and Compliance Teams

Cross-package authority delegation is one of the hardest aspects of multi-party smart contract systems to audit manually.

By automating this process, the tool will reduce the burden on development, security, and compliance teams while increasing confidence for institutions evaluating Canton-based applications.

The project will be released under the Apache 2.0 license and integrated directly into dpm, Canton’s command-line tool used to build, test, and run Canton applications. This integration will make the tool easily accessible to developers building on Daml and the broader Canton ecosystem.

For banks, financial institutions, and infrastructure providers evaluating distributed ledger infrastructure, understanding the precise behavior of smart contracts before deployment is a prerequisite. Certora’s tooling is designed to bring that level of assurance to the Canton ecosystem.

Raising the Bar for Smart Contract Assurance

“As financial institutions move serious infrastructure onto distributed ledger systems, the bar for smart contract assurance has to rise with them. Certora's work with the Canton Foundation is about meeting that bar, bringing the same rigorous, automated analysis we've built for DeFi to the institutions that need it most,” said Mooly Sagiv, Co-Founder of Certora.

Trust in distributed systems remains one of the key challenges in blockchain adoption. Canton’s privacy-first architecture provides a secure way to participate in blockchain-based financial infrastructure, but even trusted validators need smart contract behavior to be fully understood and verifiable.

Certora’s new tooling will provide developers and operators with clear, actionable insight into how contracts interact across packages, helping them evaluate security and privacy risks before deployment.

Contact Certora

Certora works with leading protocols, infrastructure providers, and financial institutions to strengthen smart contract security through formal verification, automated analysis, and continuous security assurance.

If you’re interested in learning more about the new Daml analysis tooling or working with Certora, contact our team at certora.com