DAML and Canton: a private and scalable platform for breaking information silos

Speaker:
Ognjen Maric, Digital Asset Switzerland

Abstract:
Smart contract platforms promise to facilitate writing distributed applications that span multiple organizations, thus breaking down information silos. Still, they tend to suffer from scalability, authorization and privacy problems. DAML is a smart contract programming language whose distinguishing features are its built-in models of authorization and privacy, and is being used to implement a core part of the trade processing workflow at the Australian Stock Exchange, targeting 2021 deployment. Canton is a distributed DAML runtime that implements these models faithfully. By partitioning the global state it solves both the privacy problems and the scaling bottlenecks of platforms such as Ethereum. The enhanced privacy together with a data erasure mechanism make it well-suited for building GDPR-compliant systems. Canton transports data through our so-called synchronization domains, which can be implemented by both (semi-)trusted parties and blockchains. Domains can be deployed at will to address scalability, operational or trust concerns. They can be federated to yield a virtual global ledger with no information silos, at no interoperability cost.

Biography:
Ognjen Maric is employed at Digital Asset Switzerland, working on the design, verification and implementation of a smart contract platform. His research interests include formal methods, security, distributed systems, and programming languages. Ognjen joined Digital Asset from ETH Zurich, where he obtained a PhD as a member of the Information Security Group.

Host: Prof. Fernando Pedone