Proposal: Canton Validator Traffic & Fee Operations Toolkit

[askardex]

Development Fund Proposal Submission

Proposal file: /proposals/canton-validator-ops-toolkit.md

Summary

The Canton Validator Traffic & Fee Operations Toolkit is an open-source (Apache-2.0) suite of libraries, a daemon, a CLI, and a reference dashboard that gives every Canton validator and Super Validator (SV) operator the missing economic operations layer: real-bytes traffic accounting via JSON Ledger API v2 costEstimation, per-action traffic averaging, round-aware fee calculation using live AmuletRules.extraTrafficPrice, automated traffic top-up via the traffic-purchase choice, traffic state monitoring, and round/SV-scan health diagnostics. Generalized from internal tooling already operating Askardex's Canton-mainnet Wallet and Bridge services (6+ months in production), this proposal lowers the operational TCO for every validator on Canton and provides a canonical reference for traffic estimation against the new JSON Ledger API v2.

Checklist

• Proposal file added under /proposals/
• Milestones and funding amounts defined (4 milestones, 750K CC total, 47% backloaded)
• Acceptance criteria included (per-milestone + project-wide)
• Alignment with Canton priorities described (Stability & Maintainability, App Building & DevEx — Lower TCO, Simplified traffic accounting)

Notes for Reviewers

• SIG label: node-deployment-operations
• Scope is explicitly disjoint from PR Proposal: Denex Developer SDK #238 (Denex Toolkit, LocalNet/dev), PR Proposal: Canton Participant Workbench #68 (Participant Workbench, compliance UI), PR Proposal: Open Sourcing Grant of a Validator Indexer (PQS) #67 (PQS, indexing), and Daml Package Analyzer (static analysis). The proposal section "Explicitly out of scope" calls this out.
• Existing operational evidence is included in Section 2.1 with a code-paths-to-grant-work table mapping each deliverable back to active code in the Askardex production stack (feeService.js, trafficPoller.js, validatorRoutes.js, ValidatorTrafficPage.tsx, traffictest/test_action_traffic.js, etc.). Sanitized screenshots of the internal /validator/traffic admin dashboard accompany the table.
• Status: proposal arrives at Needs Champion. SIG members in node-deployment-operations are warmly invited to self-assign for review per the Review Process.
• Live demonstrations against Askardex's internal environment, source-code walkthrough, and a private operator preview can be made available to the Champion and the Tech & Ops Committee on request.
• Author contact: Irpan, Askardex — irpan@askardex.com