Blockchain application services provider Digital Asset today announced the general availability of Daml 2.0, the newest version of the company’s privacy-focused distributed digital ledger application platform for the enterprise.
Digital Asset built its Daml so businesses and financial institutions could adopt blockchain technology, which uses widely distributed cryptographic chains to secure transactions, preserve privacy and maintain scale.
Current public blockchains such as Ethereum have scaling solutions and privacy solutions getting built into their second layer, but they are slow in development. With Daml 2.0, businesses can avoid the problems of a proprietary siloed blockchain, which suffers from limited reach, but still receive some of the benefits of a public blockchain with higher interconnectivity and increased privacy benefits.
“Lack of privacy and sovereignty is driving enterprise blockchain users into walled-garden installs,” said Craig Blitz, chief product officer at Digital Asset. “While walled-garden ecosystems provide some value, they miss the true-tail return on investment of a blockchain.”
With more businesses turning to blockchain technology to drive efficiency, it has become more important than ever to provide easy and secure methods for them to take advantage of it. Daml uses an underlying blockchain called Canton, a privacy-enabled distributed ledger that can be linked with other complimentary blockchains.
Canton enables strong privacy and compliance for financial industries and is capable of synchronizing transactions with other supported blockchains. For example, a Daml asset can be delivered on IBM Corp.’s Hyperledger Besu while the payment could be made using a different Daml asset on Hyperledger Fabric, using the same transaction.
The importance of privacy for blockchain networks means that Daml 2.0 can be used in highly sensitive industries that require compliance with regulations, share confidential information with clients or must compartmentalize data between competitors within a market.
“Daml with Canton makes digital ledger technology feasible for our customers by preserving privacy while allowing market participants to safely exchange assets and share authorized data between multiple business parties across different platforms,” said Blitz. “None of the existing blockchains have architecture that can handle keeping sensitive information private with the scalability necessary to connect the world’s assets.”
Goldman Sachs is using Daml to develop its own end-to-end tokenized asset infrastructure in regulated capital markets. With the platform, Goldman Sachs can support the entire digital life cycle across multiple asset classes on permissioned and public blockchains while still maintaining privacy for its clients.
“Daml 2.0 affords us the opportunity to unlock new users, assets and markets in a growing global ecosystem of interconnected networks,” said Mathew McDermott, managing director of Global Head of Digital Assets at Goldman Sachs. “We are looking forward to being able to open our network to potentially interconnect with other networks creating a more open and seamless global marketplace.”
The global blockchain technology market size was valued at $4.9 billion in 2021, according to a report from Research and Markets, and is estimated to reach $67.4 billion by 2026. Much of the market is being driven by increased venture capital funding and distributed finance, which allows products and services to interoperate without middlemen. Other parts of the market are increasing rapidly because of supply chains, payments and financial institutions adopting the technology to reduce costs and increase security.
Daml 2.0 with Canton is an open-source offering and developers can choose to build on Daml Open Source or Daml Enterprise. Currently, Daml 2.0 supports the enterprise blockchain and database platforms Corda, Hyperledger Besu, Hyperledger Fabric, Oracle Database, PostgreSQL and VMware Blockchain.
Developers can also build Daml 2.0 applications for Daml Hub, a managed cloud service for Daml apps, which is the easiest way for businesses to launch apps for Canton.