UPDATED 08:00 EDT / APRIL 21 2021

BLOCKCHAIN

Digital Asset lands $120M funding to advance Daml coding language for distributed apps

Distributed application platform startup Digital Asset Holdings LLC announced a big funding round today that almost doubles the amount of capital it has raised previously.

The company said today it has been granted $120 million in a Series D round of funding led by 7RIDGE and Eldride, bring its total amount raised to just north of $260 million.

Digital Asset is a popular company in the realm of blockchain technology, known for creating the Digital Asset Modeling Language. Daml, as it’s called, is a programming language used by developers to write distributed apps, or dapps, that run across networked nodes in a blockchain rather that on centralized servers. One of Daml’s key features is that it’s compatible with multiple blockchains, as well as with traditional database technologies.

Digital Asset has partnered with a number of technology infrastructure providers to integrate Daml with popular blockchain services, databases and cloud technologies to spread adoption of the language. Last July, for example, it partnered with R3 HoldCo. LLC to ensure Daml plays nicely with that company’s enterprise-grade distributed ledger blockchain technology, called Corda.

Furthermore, Daml is integrated with VMware Inc.’s Blockchain service and IBM Corp.’s Hyperledger Fabric, two of the most popular enterprise blockchain platforms. Each Daml integration shares similar code configurations that allow for dapps to be easily migrated across the blockchain platforms they run on.

With so many partnerships in place, it’s no surprise to learn that Daml has proven its worth at a number of big enterprises already, especially in the financial services sector. Digital Asset said organizations including the Australian Securities Exchange, BNP Paribas S.A., Broadridge Financial Solutions Inc. and Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing Ltd. all use Daml to write dapps that run on their blockchain networks to ensure more consistency with their data, eliminate errors and reduce latency.

A big chunk of Daml’s growth has come from more traditional platforms, however, with about half of its new business coming from nonblockchain deployments on services such as Amazon Web Services Inc.’s Aurora database, for example.

Digital Asset Chief Executive Yuval Rooz told SiliconANGLE in an interview that this nonblockchain growth was likely the result of organizations looking to the future. He said the reason Daml is interoperable with traditional database is so that companies not yet ready to switch to a decentralized platform still have a way to build distributed apps. By doing so, they will have a path to decentralization when the time is right, he explained.

Rooz said his company plans to use a part of today’s funding to develop a new “interoperability protocol” that will enable dapps and data to interact more seamlessly, essentially creating an interoperable data network across blockchain and traditional databases. He explained that with the rise of blockchain, there will inevitably be multiple heterogeneous technologies, for example some private and some public blockchains, along with traditional databases, all of which will have different requirements but also need to interact with one another.

“The way the technology is being implemented at the moment does not yet achieve this,” Rooz said. “Everyone either needs to use the same blockchain or create new, albeit larger, silos around asset classes, geographies or groups of companies that still need to reconcile with other systems.”

Rooz said Digital Asset’s proposed interoperability protocol will be built on Daml, since the language helps abstract away platform complexities, leaving developers to focus on business logic rather than the inner workings of a particular platform or database.

“For enterprises, this means they can defer their ledger choice until the application has met the necessary business requirements, creating a better fit of the technology to the use case,” Rooz said. “It also means a faster time to market, since all key stakeholders are focused on the business need and not worrying about the underlying technology.”

Image: Digital Asset Holdings

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