Per-User Traffic Accounting Goes Live on MainNet as the Splice 0.8 Rollout Is Reset
Validators and wallet providers can now attribute traffic spend to each party that submits a transaction. Separately, Splice 0.8.2 was skipped for 0.8.3, and CantonBFT's adoption on TestNet and MainNet was pushed back.
Validator operators and wallet providers on Canton MainNet can now see how much synchronizer traffic each of their users consumes. A Canton team member announced on the Canton forum on 24 September 2026 that Local Traffic Management is live on MainNet. It arrives in a month in which the network's software upgrades were partly rescheduled.
What Local Traffic Management does
The feature lets a validator attribute its synchronizer traffic spend to the individual party that submitted each transaction. According to the announcement and the documentation:
- Accounting. A TrafficService on the Ledger API, available over gRPC and the JSON API, reports what each user has spent.
- Optional enforcement. A validator can reject a user's submission when that user's balance does not cover the cost.
- Off by default. Both accounting and enforcement have to be switched on, and user accounts start at zero and must be funded explicitly.
The Splice 0.8 rollout
- Splice 0.8.0 was tagged on GitHub on 4 September and 0.8.1 on 11 September.
- On 18 September operators were told that 0.8.2 would be skipped because of a packaging issue and replaced by 0.8.3, which has no substantive code changes.
- Version 0.8.3 was scheduled for DevNet on 21 September, TestNet on 28 September and MainNet on 5 October.
- Digital Asset published Canton releases 3.5.16 to 3.5.19 between 3 and 23 September.
CantonBFT waits
On 8 September operators were told that the Logical Synchronizer Upgrade (LSU) on DevNet on 29 July had introduced CantonBFT as DevNet's ordering layer, but that adoption on TestNet and MainNet was temporarily delayed based on the DevNet results. The DevNet LSU planned for 22 to 23 September was cancelled.
If CantonBFT is ready in time, TestNet would adopt it at the next LSU on 29 to 30 September, and MainNet on 9 to 10 October. A forum post in June described CantonBFT as a new Canton-native BFT ordering service that replaces CometBFT.
Why it matters
Per-user accounting gives wallet providers a way to see, and if they choose to cap, what each user costs them in traffic. That makes it easier to offer free or subsidised wallets to retail users without one heavy user draining a shared budget. Because enforcement is optional and off by default, nothing changes for users until their provider decides to switch it on.
CantonBFT is the planned move of the Global Synchronizer's ordering layer, the part that sequences every transaction, to Canton's own service. After the delay, its timing on TestNet and MainNet is the protocol milestone to watch in the weeks ahead.
