Contract Languages of Distributed Ledgers

Quite worthwhile piece in the 'smart contract'  blockchain space,  in Financial industry,  examining:

In ACM Queue: 

Databases
  Download PDF version of this article PDF August 19, 2019
Volume 17, issue 3
Case Study
DAML: The Contract Language of Distributed Ledgers
A discussion between Shaul Kfir and Camille Fournier

When Shaul Kfir cofounded Digital Asset in 2014, he was out to prove something to the financial services industry. He saw it as being not only hamstrung by an inefficient system for transaction reconciliation, but also in danger of missing out on what blockchain technology could do to address its shortcomings.

Since then, Digital Asset has gone to market with its own distributed-ledger technology, DAML (Digital Asset Modeling Language). And that does indeed take advantage of blockchain—only not in quite the way Kfir had initially intended. He and Digital Asset ended up taking an engineering "journey" to get to where they are today.

Kfir readily admits his own background in cryptography and cryptocurrency—both as a researcher (at Technion and MIT) and as a cryptocurrency entrepreneur in Israel—had more than just a little to do with the course that was originally charted. As for lessons learned along the way, Camille Fournier, the head of platform development for a leading New York City hedge fund, helps to elicit those here. She brings to the exercise her own background in distributed-systems consensus (as one of the original committers to the Apache Zookeeper Project) and financial services (as a former VP of technology at Goldman Sachs).   .... "