Introduction

Decentralization Manager is the open-source application for creating, configuring, and managing Decentralized Parties, and the governed applications that run on them.

A Decentralized Party is a single on-chain party whose keys and approvals are split across several independent node operators, so no single node can act alone. Understanding Decentralization Manager starts with understanding parties on Canton.

Parties on Canton

On Canton Network, assets are held by a party, not by the contract itself. A party can be controlled by a single node, which means one operator holds the keys and can act alone. The Decentralized Party is native Canton technology that distributes control of a party across multiple independent nodes under a signing threshold, so an application no longer depends on, or has to trust, any single node.

Single-party building concentrates risk

When one operator controls the party that holds an application's assets, several risks compound:

• Custodial risk: a single operator can move or freeze assets.

• Operational risk: if that one node goes offline, the application stops.

• Counterparty risk: users and partners place full trust in a single entity.

• Regulatory risk: sole control of user assets concentrates custodial responsibility in one operator.

Institutions ask two questions before committing capital: who can move or freeze these assets, and what happens if one operator goes down.

Distributing trust makes applications institutional-grade

Decentralization Manager is the solution on Canton Network for building with Decentralized Parties and making applications institutional-grade. Decentralization Manager handles both sides: adding and removing operators, coordinating approvals, and keeping governance in sync. A party can be created, built upon, and configured from a visual interface or a CLI, and by connecting with peer operators, it runs the applications built on top of it.

How Decentralization Manager works

Members propose an action, confirm it against a signing threshold, then execute, with keys and governance distributed across independent nodes by design.

What can be built

The same propose, confirm, execute lifecycle supports a wide range of applications:

• Tokenization and real-world assets: multi-party issuance with on-chain governance, no single signer on the asset.

• Governed token issuance: wrapped assets, stablecoins, and backed tokens issued and managed by a Decentralized Party.

• Decentralized custody and wallets: threshold-confirmed transfers with no single custodian counterparty.

• DEXs, lending, and structured products: governed parameters, treasury workflows, and admin operations on custom DAML.

• Vaults: pooled deposits under a curator, governed by a Decentralized Party.

• Governed admin and protocol operations: hold an application's most sensitive admin and governance actions, such as updating price oracles, adjusting supply caps, tuning interest rate formulae, and setting liquidation thresholds and borrowing limits, behind a signing threshold, so no single operator can change critical parameters alone. A protocol can decentralize these admin keys first, as a security operations baseline, before extending distribution to user-facing flows or to infrastructure resilience.

The rest of these docs cover product architecture, deploying Decentralization Manager on a Canton node, creating a Decentralized Party, onboarding node operators, and building with each module.