Canton Caps Featured App Rewards at $1.50 per Transaction
CIP-0098, approved on 7 January, limits what a Featured App transaction can earn in Canton Coin, after the proposal said uncapped rewards had become disconnected from real activity.
The Canton Foundation approved CIP-0098, "Cap Per-Transaction Application Rewards at $1.50", on 7 January 2026. From approval, a single transaction by a Featured App can earn at most $1.50 worth of Canton Coin (CC) in application rewards. Until now those rewards had no cap.
The CIP was written by Eric Saraniecki, a co-founder of Digital Asset, and created on 17 December 2025.
What changes
- A hard ceiling. For every Featured App transaction, the reward weight is capped so the reward value does not exceed $1.50.
- Applies to all. The cap applies per featured transaction and equally to all Featured App rewards.
- No code change. The CIP describes it as a ledger configuration update that can take effect immediately on approval.
- Open question. A later CIP is to decide what happens to rewards that go unclaimed as a result.
Why the Foundation acted
The proposal argues that uncapped rewards made sense when the network was young, activity was low and incentives were needed to attract builders. It lists three problems with keeping them:
- Outsized returns under low load. When network activity dips, small amounts of user activity can generate very large rewards that are disconnected from the economic value delivered.
- Reward farming. Apps may optimise for rewards rather than sustainable usage.
- Broken proportionality. Rewards can exceed the fees an app's transactions generate.
According to the CIP, a $1.50 cap corresponds under low traffic conditions to a positive expected value of about 50% on the fees burned, so apps can still earn meaningful rewards without extracting outsized value.
Also approved on 7 January
The same day, the Foundation approved CIP-0099, which changes the adoption incentives for zerohash, a Super Validator. It says Circle deployed USDCx on Canton rather than native USDC, which made zerohash's original volume milestones harder to reach. The CIP extends zerohash's deadline to enable USDCx to 31 March 2026 and, from 1 April 2026, measures its milestones by USDCx and CC volume settled on Canton.
Why it matters
Application rewards are one of the main channels through which new CC enters circulation. Capping them per transaction is meant to make issuance track genuine use more closely, and to reduce the incentive to generate low-value transactions just to collect rewards. For Featured Apps, it puts a ceiling on how much a single transaction can earn, whatever the network's load.
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