Proposal: Traffic-Based App Rewards

[waynecollier-da]

Development Fund Proposal Submission

Proposal file:
Link to the proposal added in this PR (e.g., /proposals/2026-03-Development-Fund-Proposal-Traffic-Based-App-Rewards.md)

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Summary

This proposal requests funding to develop, release, and deploy the traffic-based app reward system specified in CIP-0104 to the Global Synchronizer. This implementation replaces the current featured app activity marker mechanism with a system that rewards featured applications proportionally to the actual traffic burn their transactions generate on the network.

The core change eliminates the need for applications to create FeaturedAppActivityMarker contracts and instead measures the actual traffic burn contributed by all activity of an app provider party, using sequencer and mediator data directly. Activity is attributed to app providers based on their role as confirmers of transaction views, with traffic cost distributed proportionally across envelopes. This produces a fairer, more transparent, and less governance-intensive reward mechanism that aligns app incentives with genuine network utilization.

The implementation spans Canton node changes (traffic summary and mediator inspection APIs), Splice Scan app changes (temporal contract store, activity record ingestion, reward computation with Merkle-tree based commitments), Splice SV app changes (reward confirmation and coupon creation triggers), Daml model changes (RewardCouponV2, ProcessRewardsV2, CalculateRewardsV2), and wallet app integration. The system is designed to be rolled out incrementally, with traffic data observable on Scan before the actual reward switch, and a dry-run mode on MainNet to detect non-determinism bugs before going live.

Digital Asset expects that when deployed on the Global Synchronizer, this work will reduce the governance burden on Super Validators, eliminate the computational overhead of activity markers on SV nodes, reduce the need for human oversight of application rewards, and establish an objective, traffic-proportional reward system that scales to tens of thousands of featured app provider parties.

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Checklist

• Proposal file added under /proposals/
• Milestones and funding amounts defined
• Acceptance criteria included
• Alignment with Canton priorities described

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Notes for Reviewers

(Add anything the Tech & Ops Committee should pay attention to.)