Digital Asset, a New York-based firm that has received over $100 million in total funding in order to develop a platform for “reducing settlement latency and counterparty risk,” announced a couple weeks ago that it had open-sourced DAML “under the Apache 2.0 license.”
According to its official website, the Digital Asset Modeling Language (DAML) is a software development stack created specifically for writing secure smart contracts. The DAML software development kit (SDK) is now available for download.
An “Exclusive Smart Contract Language” For “Common Domain Model”
Additionally, the management at Digital Asset noted in its blog post, published on April 16, that ISDA, which is the “standards body for the derivatives market,” revealed recently that DAML is “the exclusive smart contract language” for their “Common Domain Model” (CDM).
The CDM is “an industry data standard for booking and representing over-the-counter (OTC) derivative products and the events that occur on these products throughout their lifecycle.”
As mentioned in Digital Asset’s announcement, they’ve recently open-sourced a “reference library and [supporting] application.” The Digital Asset management team also announced this month that it has been working with developers and researchers at VMware, in order to “integrate DAML” with their enterprise-grade blockchain platform, called VMware Blockchain.
In addition to launching these initiatives, the team at Digital Asset has revealed it has also been collaborating with “fellow Hyperledger members” through a Blockchain Technology Partners (BTP) program. This will reportedly involve “integrating” the DAML runtime environment with Hyperledger Sawtooth.
Developing Software On Modular Platforms
According to Digital Asset, the Hyperledger Sawtooth is a complete modular platform for creating, deploying and managing distributed ledger technology (DLT)-based networks. The New York-based tech firm also noted that Hyperledger Sawtooth complies with standards and requirements specified in the DAML framework.
As detailed in the post, Hyperledger Sawtooth’s “Transaction Processor has a very flexible approach towards roles and permissions, for example, and is based on a very natural DLT network topology of fully distributed peers. DAML is based on a permissioned architecture and Hyperledger Sawtooth can be configured to be permissioned without requiring special nodes.”
Abstracting Implementation Details
DAML is used to define and write smart contracts in a manner that creates an abstraction. This is done so that certain blockchain-specific implementation details are hidden from end-users, such as the type of cryptography scheme used and the technical methods of data distribution.
One of the main reasons for using abstraction is to allow developers to program through a user-friendly API. Moreover, code written using DAML support allows software architects to easily migrate applications from one platform to another without having to rewrite a lot of code.
