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Annotated tour

A narrated walkthrough that explains why IRSForge is shaped the way it is. Pair this with Quickstart — the quickstart shows what to click; this page explains why each surface exists.

The yaml-first design​

Everything is driven by irsforge.yaml at the repo root. One file. profile: demo | production is the only switch between "runs offline on a laptop" and "deploys against real Canton participants with OIDC and live curve feeds."

Why: a participant evaluating Canton should be able to read one config file and see exactly what they need to provide for production. The demo isn't a separate codebase — it's the same code with stub providers.

See Demo vs Production.

Why a Workspace separate from a Blotter​

Trading screens (/) and risk screens (/blotter) have different rhythms:

  • Workspace is draft-first — most of what you compose never lands on-chain. It's a pricing surface.
  • Blotter is live-first — every row is on-chain.

What-If on the blotter (a temporary draft cloned from a live position) bridges the two without conflating them.

Why signed Credit Support Balance, not two pools​

Earlier iterations tracked postedByA and postedByB separately. That model admitted a state real CSAs never reach (both sides simultaneously posted) and produced phantom margin calls on the wrong side when one side over-posted.

The signed-CSB model — one signed per-currency balance per pair — is what Bloomberg MARS, AcadiaSoft and real ISDA CSAs use. It makes the bug structurally impossible.

See CSA Model.

Why the scheduler is its own party​

Lifecycle and settlement choices need a Daml signatory. Hardcoding Operator would conflate "platform admin" with "automated cron driver" — bad for audit, bad for credential rotation.

Scheduler is a separate party with its own JWT. Daml 2.x has no disjunctive controllers (controller a | b doesn't exist), so we ship sister *ByScheduler choices for every effect the scheduler needs. Same body helper, different controller.

See Scheduler.

Why the demo curve ticker exists​

Canton's PublishDiscountCurve archives the previous Curve contract on every publish. The ACS holds exactly one curve per key. Without something tickling the curves during a demo, the blotter's Trend column would be flat.

The ticker re-publishes seeded curves with bp-noise on a cron — purely cosmetic, demo-only, vanishes in production.

See Demo Curve Ticker.

Why the manual override toggle​

scheduler.manualOverridesEnabled: true (demo) exposes "Trigger / Settle / Mature" buttons in the UI so a human can drive the demo deterministically. In production it's false — buttons hidden, scheduler is the only path.

The contracts don't change — both code paths exist in Daml. The toggle is UI-only.

Why FpML​

Every existing IR-derivatives platform (Bloomberg, IHS Markit, ICE) speaks FpML. Round-trip FpML import/export means a Canton-resident swap can be moved into and out of off-chain systems without manual re-keying.

See FpML Import / Export.

What's intentionally out of scope (today)​

  • Live providers for EFFR, FX, and credit curves — Phase 9 follow-up. Until then those flows use demo.* stubs.
  • Bilateral CSA proposal — current init seeds CSAs at boot via submitMulti. Production deployments will want a CsaProposal template (mirror of CdsProposal).
  • Holiday calendars / business-day adjustments — IRSForge runs 24/7 on-chain. Calendars are informational only.
  • Versioning of the docs site — single "current" version; turn on when v1 cuts.