This would be needed to perform off-the-grid transactions between parties having such mobile devices which can communicate via Bluetooth or NFC.
Hi @gyorgybalazsi , that’s a great question. The answer is: we are thinking about how to offer secure mobile wallets for Canton, but there are currently no concrete plans.
There are difficult tradeoffs to be made. The fundamental assumption of Canton is that each party validates and confirms the transactions that they are involved in - where their authority is used as a controller or signatory. That’s only possible if the party’s node is available, which is difficult to guarantee on a mobile device. Being able to validate for a party is as good as being able to impersonate that party.
So really, mobile wallets / light nodes only work in situations where the party itself doesn’t have to do their own validation. But then whoever does do the validation gets to see all of the party’s data so you lose privacy.
Ergo, light nodes on mobile work great in public networks where everything is public and disinterested miners and full nodes do the validation. It does not work as well for Canton.
But… Imagine you had a disinterested decentralised party theNetwork : Party and you did not care about privacy much. Then you could just sign all contracts with theNetwork and implement a light client that only needs to be online when you want to transact.
Use-cases for such a set-up exist (eg if you wanted to launch a public cryptocurrency on Canton). But we’d need to enable such use-cases first and see them take off before it makes sense to develop the wallet capabilities for them.
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Yes, that makes sense, thank you!