Digital Asset is making its smart contract language open-source to help more enterprises access blockchain

Digital Asset, the New York-based firm helping big banks wade into blockchain, seems to be fulfilling its new CEO's plans to make its tech more open. 

The company announced Thursday that it would make its DAML smart contract language open-source for banks and other institutions to freely use and tinker with. Only last month, recently-appointed CEO Yuval Rooz told The Block that he hoped to make its technology more accessible.

"So historically, I think that if you were to ask people what do you think about Digital Asset they would say it is proprietary, closed," he said in an interview in March. "I think that what you will see moving forward is much more openness."

Digital Asset's smart contract language, DAML, was in private beta mode until now, according to the firm. It will go head-to-head with other programming languages on the market, such as Solidity and Viper, which are used to write smart contracts; blockchain protocols that can facilitate trust-less transactions and negotiations. 

"DAML brings a lot of different differentiators," Shaul Kfir, co-founder and CTO of Digital Asset, said in an interview with The Block. "We don't want [blockchain developers] to be thinking about how to hash, how to sign something," he added, noting DAML aims to be more usable for the less technologically keen. 

"It is stronger than other languages because it allows them to focus on the business. They may not be able to write it, but the business guy can look at [the code] and say this is what I intended or this is what I didn't intend from a business perspective."

Digital Asset counts a number of large financial-service firms as users of its smart contract language, including BNP Paribas and Accenture. Such institutions can use the language to write up different blockchain applications or integrate it into its traditional database systems, Kfir said. 

"Accenture has been working closely with Digital Asset and now has over 240 developers using DAML," David Treat, managing director and global blockchain lead at Accenture, said in a press release. "We frequently advise our clients on which ledger platform they should select for their use case."