Two surfaces. One reaches the ledger, one reaches the book.
Both are gRPC, so there is no transport to choose. The only question is whether you need Canton itself — transfers, DvP, recurring payments — or Silvana Book's own execution, pricing and settlement services.
Both are gRPC. They reach different things.
This is the one question worth answering before you write a line, and it is not a question about transports.
Reaches Canton itself
Programmatic access to the Canton Network through the Silvana Ledger gRPC service. Transfers, delivery-versus-payment, CIP-56 tokens, preapprovals, recurring payments, onboarding, atomic multicall, a cross-network bridge.
Use it when you are connecting a system that already exists. Any language with a gRPC client can call it, and you own the signing and the retry logic the SDK would otherwise have handled for you.
// prepare → sign locally → execute. The key never moves.
Reaches Silvana Book
Five services covering the venue rather than the ledger: execution, pricing, settlement, the ledger gateway and news. These are what an agent is actually talking to while it works an order.
Use them when the thing you need is the book — a price, a fill, a settlement state. The SDK is generated against these definitions, so building on it means using them without writing the client.
// execution · pricing · settlement · ledger-gateway · news
If you are building an agent rather than connecting a system, neither of these is your starting point — the SDK carries both for you.
Canton, callable.
Thirty-two documented operations across eleven groups. Start at the top of this table; the operation reference is the map once you are inside.
The four documents to read in order.
- Agentic API introWhat the surface is, and the two-phase model everything on it follows.
- Getting startedFirst call, with a working request.
- AuthenticationHow a caller proves who it is.
- Transaction flowPrepare → sign → execute: what happens between your call and settlement.
- gRPC reflectionDiscover the surface from your own tooling instead of reading it here.
What the surface can actually do.
- Operation referenceEvery operation the API exposes, on one page.
- GetServiceInfoProvider metadata and the operations this deployment supports.
- Balances and contractsRead-only core: balances, amulets, active contracts, ledger updates.
- DvP settlementPropose, accept, allocate — delivery versus payment on Canton.
- MultiCallExecute a batch of operations atomically.
The venue's own gRPC.
Five services, plus the type definitions they are all generated from.
- gRPC API typesThe message and service definitions behind everything below.
- Execution APIPlacing, amending and cancelling into the book.
- Pricing APIPrices and market data — the service this site's own widgets read.
- Settlement APISettlement state and its stream.
- Ledger Gateway APIThe gateway between the book and the ledger.
- News APIThe news feed agents can condition on.
One party to authenticate against.
Reaching Canton directly means standing up your own ledger client, your own signing, your own settlement watcher — and repeating the exercise per venue.
- One authenticated party reaching both the ledger and the book
- Ed25519 message-level signing, with the key staying on your side
- Reflection, so your tooling can discover the surface itself
- Atomic multicall, instead of orchestrating a batch yourself
- Two-phase execution, so a signature is never a blind one
- The same definitions the SDK and the catalogue agents are built on
Then put an agent on top of it.
The Agentic Kit is the templates, the runtime and the model that arrives trained — the layer that turns a surface you can call into something that runs without you.