It’s important to frequently review changes in the world of DAML as it is a dynamic and evolving language created to meet explosive demand.

What is DAML? It’s typically described as an Open Source language written to facilitate the creation of private smart contracts. If a public blockchain is a public distributed ledger technology, where every participating member knows about every transaction, then DAML is optimized for the creation of private contract types handling confidential transactions.

DAML is platform agnostic, which makes it suitable for the coupling of private contracts across domains and .. even fabrics.

DAML can be used to create ledgers in which involved parties only see and participate in the elements that are relevant to them. These multiparty agreements can run on a standard database, distributed ledger technology or even a private blockchain.

The key is that compiled DAML is understandable by the people who wrote it and the machine it runs on, yet still contains enough detail to control the elements necessary for the transactions it describes.

Even elements that are found to need further definition can be updated to the data schema embedded within that contracts execution language, rather than being set prior to the contract’s creation.

In this session, let’s get familiar with some of the terminology and concepts used in creating contracts with DAML.

Before we do, we’d like to give a shout out to Dr. Bernhard Elsner who has been a major contributor to the documentation within and surrounding the evolution of DAML.

Let's get started!