BLOCKCHAIN
The language of hope Remember Esperanto, the first attempt to create a common language between nations, designed to foster world peace and mutual understanding? There’s no evidence that it succeeded in the first, but as an auxiliary language currently used by two million people worldwide, it’s certainly helped to promote the second. That’s kind of the premise behind Digital Asset’s programming language DAML – not to achieve world peace perhaps, but to overcome barriers in communication, in this case between computer systems and, specifically, blockchain networks. Most people understand a blockchain to be a database for openly recording transactions between parties in a verifiable, secure fashion. But, beyond that, many are baffled by the technology’s complexities and have only a weak understanding of how a distributed ledger works, much less knowledge of the coding that underpins it. What anyone investing in the technology does know, however, is that the choices they make around it will most likely affect not only their future but also their current operating systems. Lack of knowledge and uncertainty have undoubtedly held back adoption of the technology, according to Digital Asset chief executive Yuval Rooz, but he believes that DAML could solve that. DAML is unique in being technology agnostic – use it to digitise a workflow and the software will integrate with whatever blockchain system, or indeed non-blockchain database, that sits beneath. “A company could model its processes with our language and still persist on traditional technology. And the nice thing about that is a lot of people are very comfortable running applications on traditional databases, think PostgreSQL, for example. But in a year from now, if you wanted to move your entire
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ThePaytechMagazine | Issue 6
Digital Asset has developed a programming language that could hasten the adoption of blockchain by removing barriers to interoperability. Co-founder and CEO Yuval Rooz talks DAML process to a blockchain, because you believed that technology had matured to a point you were comfortable with, you wouldn’t have to change the application. The application would run on a blockchain, giving it a futureproof element – and the work would not have to be done again,” explains Rooz. Initially developed by Digital Asset to meet its own internal blockchain development needs, DAML has become the company’s core product and has recently helped it win investment from tech giants including VMware, Samsung and Salesforce during its Series C financing round. Software giant VMware was already using DAML to operate its own blockchain system. Rooz says the firm used DAML as a way to differentiate itself from rivals when pitching to potential clients. This summer DAML was integrated as a cross-platform alternative to Corda’s native programming language – possibly
the best-known financial enterprise-based blockchain, run by R3. DAML has solved silo issues caused by the various blockchain pioneers who used code unique to their particular distributed ledger, creating, in effect, islands of information that do not easily connect to each other. “Because every blockchain is unique, asking your development team to really understand the ins and outs of every type of distributed ledger technology is not scalable,” says Rooz. “As the developer, you don’t really care what underlying technology is running beneath your application, you simply want it to be decentralised. So, DAML is a smart contract language that is platform agnostic. It means if you develop an application to run on Corda, it will work in the same way on Fabric.” Right now, in a time of pandemic, when replacing manual processes with digital workflows has become urgent, DAML promises relative simplicity and flexibility across any and all platforms, which could make those choices under pressure easier. Rooz was a co-founder of Digital Asset in 2014, a time when blockchain meant Bitcoin in the minds of most people who were aware of it. He points out that blockchain is simply a tool – a database in essence – and businesses should not get hung up on the technology but rather focus on using it as a solution to improve workflow efficiency. “COVID has brought digitisation of processes into sharp focus and blockchain promises a solution due to its inherent resilience,” says Rooz. “Organisations have business continuity plans (BCPs) but no one imagined a BCP that said ‘every single employee of your company will now work from home’.” He points out that the distributed nature of a blockchain means there is
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