Canton has 46 super validators — though only 13 are actively running nodes. To become one, you apply, make your case to the existing validators, and need a supermajority to vote yes.

Yuval Rooz, co-founder and CEO of Digital Asset, says that’s no different from staking requirements on Ethereum or Solana.

Laura Shin says there is literally a permission moment where validators decide yes or no. Haseeb Qureshi compares it to calling something democratic and then controlling who gets to vote. And Alex Gluchowski eventually concedes the permissionless argument — only to say the more interesting question is whether Canton is a blockchain at all.

The conversation covers what super validators actually do, why Yuval built the admission model around skin-in-the-game rather than staking, how Canton’s validator set compares to Stellar, Ripple, Hedera, and BNB, and what percentage of applicants have actually been rejected. The answer to that last one is not what you might expect.

This clip is from a longer debate on whether Canton is a real blockchain. Full episode here: https://youtube.com/live/0M3jW-Y-4oA

We go live every Monday and Thursday — subscribe to catch it live.

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