Digital Asset Holdings, a venture-backed developer of distributed ledger technology, today revealed that it acquired Zurich-based Elevence Digital Finance AG, a technology firm that has developed an expressive language for financial institutions to model and execute agreements.
The acquisition has led the the New York-based startup to also announce the Digital Asset Modeling Language (DAML), a privacy preserving yet provable alternative to Smart Contracts designed specifically for financial services.
The Elevence team will play a major role in DAML’s development as the Swiss firm has already developed a modeling language capable of expressing any right or obligation, including cash, securities and derivatives. The code defines the considerations between parties and determines how these contractual relations can evolve over time. This provides relevant parties with a unified view of current and future rights and obligations on a need-to-know basis, rather than revealing confidential information as in smart contract systems.
This technology complements Digital Asset’s existing distributed ledger software by providing a new, verifiable way for parties to a transaction to independently prove updates to the ledger while preserving data confidentiality.
Blythe Masters, CEO of Digital Asset, commented:
“With this acquisition, we will harness the power of Elevence’s technology and its team of talented individuals to enhance our offering for the financial services industry. The resulting Digital Asset platform is specifically designed to address financial services applications requiring automation, privacy and immutability.”
Digital Asset is absorbing Elevence’s team while expanding its European presence with the opening of a Zurich office. The Swiss company has a team of eight experienced software architects, specialized consultants, and financial professionals all with backgrounds in functional programming, quantitative finance and algorithmic trading. Elevence CEO, Vincent Peikert, will join Digital Asset as Head of Digital Asset Switzerland and Head of Product for Europe, and James Litsios, Chief Technology Officer, will become Head of Development, Switzerland.
Vincent Peikert, CEO of Elevence, added:
“Digital Asset is recognized as a leading provider of distributed ledger technology and has a remarkable team developing and deploying cutting-edge software for financial institutions. This makes the company an ideal partner for Elevence, and joining forces will enable us to offer the broadest portfolio of solutions to the benefit of our customers.”
Elevence’s technology will be integrated into the Digital Asset software stack, combining modeled asset workflows with a distributed ledger to ensure that previously siloed records are synchronized and accurate.
Digital Asset already has offices in London, Sydney, San Francisco, Tel Aviv and Budapest, and, since launching in 2014, has acquired three other companies, Hyperledger, Bits of Proof and Blockstack.
