HackCanton: From Covered Calls to Private Settlement, What Builders Shipped on CBTC

HackCanton Season 2, hosted by AppsFactory by NODERS, drew more than 360 participants from over 60 countries. BitSafe sponsored the CBTC Ecosystem Challenge. Thank you to NODERS for running a strong hackathon and giving builders room to test practical ideas on Canton Network.

Teams used Canton Network as part of the product itself, not simply as infrastructure underneath it.

The cohort covered private trading, fund settlement, financing, treasury controls and developer tooling. These products depend on sharing information with the right participants without exposing the full workflow.

That is where Canton matters. Privacy is architectural on Canton, not bolted on. A sealed bid can remain private to the parties who need to see it. A position can be auditable without being broadcast to the market. Cash and an asset can move in one atomic transaction instead of across disconnected systems.

CBTC gave teams a programmable Bitcoin-backed asset to use inside those workflows. The strongest builds did more than mention CBTC in a deck. They showed how it could move, settle, lock or support a repeatable application flow.

AppsFactory by NODERS named BasisYield, Umbra and Overwrite as the winners of the CBTC Ecosystem Challenge.

BasisYield built a private funding-rate strategy engine. The concept pairs a Bitcoin position on Canton with an offsetting position elsewhere, while using Canton's privacy model to protect the strategy book. Its pitch also showed a live Canton DevNet transaction and clear risk controls.

Umbra built a private OTC desk for large cross-asset trades. Buyers request quotes from selected dealers, each dealer's price remains private from the others, and the chosen trade settles atomically. The team demonstrated a settlement flow across CBTC, cETH and Canton Coin.

Overwrite built a covered-call vault for CBTC. Its application models deposits, collateral allocation, premiums and settlement as ledger state changes while keeping the vault's book private from the wider market.

The three projects approached different problems, but they shared one useful pattern: privacy changed how the product worked. It was not a label added after the product was designed.

Several finalists focused on markets where public-by-default infrastructure creates real costs.

Tirai used sealed quotes for OTC block trades. AuctionMonster applied sealed-bid auctions to tokenized assets. CrossDesk combined price discovery, fund administration and atomic NAV settlement for tokenized funds. Rocky Exchange brought spot and perpetual trading into a Canton-native venue.

The common thread is market information. Large orders, dealer quotes, fund valuations and positions can all move prices when exposed too early. Canton lets builders decide which participants can see each part of a workflow, while preserving an auditable ledger record.

This is a practical distinction for institutional applications. Privacy-enabled execution is not about hiding activity. It is about preventing unnecessary information leakage while keeping the parties to a transaction accountable.

The finalist set also included products aimed at financing and private-market operations.

CCX and Trezia explored multi-lender invoice financing with private bids. Atrium combined private-capital diligence with atomic delivery-versus-payment settlement. Continuum built a closing room for private-equity secondary transactions. Menzel proposed a property profit-participation workflow with a pilot path in Morocco.

These projects matter because they start with familiar business processes. Invoices, investment documents, approvals and settlement already exist. The opportunity is to replace disconnected files, portals and payment steps with a shared workflow in which each party sees only what it needs.

Other teams widened the field. Forecast designed prediction markets with transparent prices and private positions. Pulla used Canton privacy for provably fair blind packs of graded cards. Vanton explored payments between AI agents with ledger-enforced spending limits. Veilio Exchange focused on revocable data-access agreements. Daml Lens translated raw Daml events into readable workflow states for developers and operators. 4lpha AI proposed a treasury agent constrained by on-ledger policies.

The range is important. The cohort did not converge on one app model. It found several places where privacy-enabled coordination can create a better product.

A polished pitch helped teams explain an idea, but technical evidence made it credible.

The strongest submissions gave reviewers something concrete to inspect:

This evidence discipline is worth carrying into any Canton build. Start with one repeatable workflow. Show who can act, what each party can see and what moves on-ledger. Then document the boundary between the working product and the roadmap.

That is more useful than trying to present a complete market on day one.

Hackathons compress product discovery into a short build window. They prove that a team can frame a problem and ship a credible prototype. They do not prove market adoption.

For this cohort, the next work is straightforward: validate the buyer, use real assets where appropriate, make the settlement path repeatable and test the workflow with a design partner.

BitSafe plans to reach out to selected top teams and invite them to form the pilot cohort of the upcoming BitSafe Ecosystem Enablement Program. The program is designed to help Canton builders move forward through technical guidance, partner introductions and amplification. An invitation is a starting point for collaboration, not a guarantee of funding, partnership, mainnet launch or Featured App status.

That distinction matters. The goal is not to celebrate prototypes as finished products. It is to help credible teams turn a strong build into something institutions and developers can use.

HackCanton Season 2 showed that builders are ready to move beyond generic infrastructure demos. They are designing private markets, settlement systems and financial workflows around real constraints.

The clearest lesson is simple: choose a workflow where privacy or atomic settlement changes the product, then prove it with an inspectable on-ledger flow.

Explore the BitSafe developer documentation and start with one transaction that your application can make real.