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How to Disable Canton Coins on a Canton Validator

Tags: canton blockchain kubernetes daml

Author
Written by: Tushar Sharma

Background

The Canton Network is a blockchain infrastructure built on Daml. Each validator node ships with a wallet component that allows participants to hold, send, and receive Canton Coins (CC) — the native token of the network.

Disabling the wallet does not affect your validator's ability to process transactions or host Daml applications. It simply opts the node out of the CC-related smart contracts.

The Configuration Flag

Canton validator configuration is written in HOCON syntax. The flag to disable the wallet lives under the validator backend config block:

canton.validator-apps.validator_backend { enable-wallet = false }

Setting enable-wallet = false prevents the validator from initialising the wallet app instance on startup.

Applying It in a Kubernetes Deployment

The Canton validator image reads additional HOCON config from environment variables prefixed with ADDITIONAL_CONFIG_. This makes it straightforward to inject configuration via a Kubernetes Deployment without rebuilding the image.

Add the following env entry to your validator container spec:

  • name: ADDITIONAL_CONFIG_DISABLE_WALLET value: | canton.validator-apps.validator_backend { enable-wallet = false }

A minimal deployment snippet showing this in context:

apiVersion: apps/v1 kind: Deployment metadata: name: canton-validator-deploy spec: template: spec: containers: - name: canton-validator-app image: ghcr.io/digital-asset/decentralized-canton-sync/docker/validator-app: ports: - containerPort: 5003 name: validator-http readinessProbe: httpGet: path: /api/validator/readyz port: 5003 env: # ... other required env vars ...

        - name: ADDITIONAL_CONFIG_DISABLE_WALLET
          value: |
            canton.validator-apps.validator_backend {
              enable-wallet = false
            }

Replace <VERSION> with the validator app version you are deploying (e.g. 0.5.12).

How Additional Config Variables Work

The validator image merges all ADDITIONAL_CONFIG_* environment variables into its effective configuration at startup. Each variable is treated as a HOCON fragment and applied on top of the base config in alphabetical order by variable name. This means you can layer multiple overrides independently, for example:

Variable Purpose
ADDITIONAL_CONFIG_DISABLE_WALLET Disable Canton Coin wallet
ADDITIONAL_CONFIG_PERSISTENCE Configure Postgres storage
ADDITIONAL_CONFIG_BFT_SCAN Set BFT scan client URLs
ADDITIONAL_CONFIG_MIGRATION_ID Set domain migration ID

Verification

After deploying, check the validator logs for wallet-related startup messages. With enable-wallet = false, you should not see the wallet app initialisation output that appears in a default deployment.

You can also call the readiness endpoint to confirm the validator is up:

curl http://<VALIDATOR_HOST>:5003/api/validator/readyz

A 200 OK response confirms the validator started successfully without the wallet.

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