dAppBooster Starter Kit for Canton Apps Ships as Two Hackathons Wrap Up
An open-source, wallet-agnostic toolkit backed by the Development Fund lands as Cantor8 names its London winners and HackCanton Season 3 reaches its closing ceremony.
Builders on the Canton Network got a new open-source starter kit this week, as two hackathons came to an end. dAppBooster for Canton was announced live on 5 October 2026, Cantor8 announced the winners of its London hackathon on 6 October, and HackCanton Season 3 held its closing ceremony on 9 October.
dAppBooster: a starting point instead of a blank page
dAppBooster for Canton, built by BootNode, is a full-stack starter for building a dApp interface on top of a Daml package. The Canton Development Fund supported the work, according to the announcement on the Canton forum. It includes:
- canton-barebones, which starts a local Canton environment with one command.
- canton-connect, which wraps Canton's official dApp SDK in React hooks modelled on the popular wagmi library, for wallet connection, signing and ledger queries.
- canton-dappbooster, a template with reusable interface components such as a connect button and a token selector.
- A reference app, a Canton Coin vesting example at demo.dappbooster.cc, plus a version that works without a wallet.
Because it is built on the dApp SDK, signing and execution are handed to the user's wallet, and any wallet that follows the CIP-0103 standard works without wallet-specific code. The team calls this release Milestone 1, a minimum viable product, and says it now wants to help teams ship production apps on it.
Cantor8 in London
Cantor8 held an in-person Canton hackathon in London on 29 August, with the Oxford Blockchain Society presenting and Imperial FinTech and Blockchain and the Cambridge Blockchain Society also listed as hosts. On 6 October Cantor8 said it had announced the winners, thanked judges from the Canton Foundation, 7RIDGE, Alchemy and Dedge Security, and said more was coming on a CANTOR8 Accelerator. The winners were announced on X.
HackCanton Season 3
The online HackCanton Season 3 opened on 17 September with up to $50,000 in cash and credits on offer. Two days before the close, the organisers counted 91 teams, 52 projects, 78 build diaries and 12 projects submitted for judging. The closing ceremony was set for 12:00 UTC on 9 October, with submissions open until 23:59 UTC that day. CantonCap had not seen a published list of winners at the time of writing.
Why it matters
Building a consumer-facing app on Canton has meant more custom work than on EVM chains, especially for wallet connections. A free starter that works with any standard wallet lowers that cost, and it is one of the first visible results of Development Fund grants for developer tooling. The hackathon numbers show developer interest growing beyond the institutional core of the network.
