Digital Asset Reveals Smart Contracts Alternative for Financial Industry

By Samburaj Das for Cryptocoinsnews

In an announcement today, New York-based blockchain startup Digital Asset Holdings (DAH) revealed its acquisition of Swiss technology firm Elevence Digital Finance AG. With the acquisition, DAH has announced the Digital Asset Modelling language, an alternative to Smart Contracts that is specifically designed for financial services.

Digital Asset has revealed its acquisition Zurich-based Elevence, a technology firm behind the development of an ‘expressive language’ that enables financial institutions to “model and execute with certainty and finality.”

Digital Asset saw Elevence’s technology as a solution to provide a new, verifiable way for participants in a transaction to “independently prove updates” to a blockchain while ensuring confidentiality, as opposed to information being revealed in Smart Contracts systems.

Elevence’s technology is developed by a team of eight computer scientists and financial technologists, each one possessing a Ph.D. or a Masters degree in their relevant fields.

In a statement, Blythe Masters, CEO of Digital Asset said:

The resulting Digital Asset platform (following the acquisition) is specifically designed to address financial services applications requiring automation, privacy and immutability.

A Modelling Language for DA’s Blockchain

A press release by Digital Asset today explains the technology developed by Elevence.

Elevence has developed a powerful modelling language capable of expressing any right or obligation, including cash, securities and derivatives, whereby the code defines the considerations between parties and determines how these contractual relations can evolve over time.

The Blythe Masters-led blockchain startup also revealed that its engineers have been working with the team of eight from Elevence for the past few months, integrating the latter’s technology into DAH’s stack. With it, the company announced the Digital Asset Modeling Language (DAML), an innovation it deems as a “privacy-preserving yet provable alternative” to Smart Contracts.

More specifically, DAML is designed for a private execution (closed) environment rather than an open-execution environment such as the bitcoin blockchain wherein it would have to be processed by every node in the network.

Unlike Smart Contract platforms, agreements written in using DAML will only need to be authorized by the relevant participants. A separate press release announcing the DAML also revealed that it can interact with an open-source distributed ledger like the Linux Foundation-led Hyperledger Project. The release also includes a series of FAQs for a detailed explanation of the Smart Contracts alternative DAML.

Technical teams from Digital Asset and Elevence will come together to work in a new Zurich office as a part of Digital Asset’s European expansion which already sees an office in London.

Featured image from Shutterstock.