Digital Asset Opens Smart Contract Language to Developers

Distributed-ledger technology (DLT) provider Digital Asset has decided to open its smart contract language, DAML, to the wider developer community after running a private beta program among its clients, such as Accenture, the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX), ABN Amro, and the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation.

The contract modeling language is built specifically for distributed ledgers and codifies complex, multi-party agreements. The program aims to provide developers with tools and training so that they can use the DAML Software Developer Kit (SDK) to model multi-party applications that run on the Digital Asset Platform.

While speaking on a panel at the Synchronize 2018 conference, Blythe Masters, CEO of Digital Asset, said that it was important to build a DLT-specific modeling language, because general-purpose modeling languages can lead to errors that can infect the larger market.

“When we talk about distributed-ledger technology or blockchain, there is a companion field of excitement related to smart contracts. The reality is that not all smart contracts are created equal and not all smart contracts are created smart,” she said. “What we discovered when working with a very clear set of enterprise objectives to, for example, replace an entire post-trade infrastructure for trade registration, netting, clearing, settlement, update the central securities depository, and the processing of corporate actions for securities from start to finish, was that general-purpose modeling languages on top of this new distributed-ledger database architecture, was just a really bad idea.”

She said that general-purpose languages are often preferred by coders because “you can model an eventuality…[where] you can experience any eventuality,” which can be enticing when dealing with “enormous, high-value, market-sensitive, confidential flows.” Masters, however, argued that DAML reduces the risk of developer automation errors while providing the necessary confidentiality of a shared record of value transfer.

“We developed DAML, which is part of a family known loosely as functional and domain-specific modeling languages, specifically for the purpose of use in financial services and other industries where we’re dealing with value transfer,” she said. “What it has is an essentially defined or finite [number of] outcomes that are intentionally constrained to limit the edge cases that anybody who has ever coded much—which, by the way, does not include me—knows that coding anything accurately is very, very hard to do. So having built-in guardrails simply prevents you from,” code-driven glitches that lead to market disruptions.

The vendor says that the DAML SDK includes the same integrated set of developer tools used by Digital Asset’s engineers to build the platform that will eventually replace the ASX’s post-trade clearing and settlement system for cash equities.