What's New

Diversity is an important initiative at Digital Asset as we work to increase both our own diversity and that of the sectors we work in. As part of that initiative we held a virtual panel discussion where some of our top women leaders will be discussing how they got to where they are, the challenges they've faced, tips to accelerate impact in the workforce, and much more. 

The engineering team is open sourcing dev-env, a set of tools which lets you pin specific versions of executables in your project and transparently manage them. Think of it like a Nix-lite.

Innover Digital won a Stevie Award for creating a Daml application which provides "a real-time supply chain visibility platform […] in record 4 weeks to combat shortage of medical supplies in hospitals during COVID-19

As always Richard has been keeping us up to date with the latest and greatest security and privacy news on our forum.

Daml is being used for a hackathon in Morocco, quite cool!

Jobs

Digital Asset is hiring for many positions including Engineering, Client Experience, Business Development, and Sales. If you even has so much of an inkling that a job is for you then make sure to visit digitalasset.com/careers to apply and share with your network.

SGX is looking for a Lead Developer with Daml knowledge to expand their digital bond infrastructure.

Upcoming Events

We’re presenting at Hyperledger India today and will have the video shared on our forum shortly.

Andreas' talk from POPL 2021 on using Canton to create privacy aware smart contracts running on top of interoperable ledgers is now available on our youtube channel.

Francesco recently presented on Daml's usecases and benefits at Hyperledger Milan, the video can be found on their YouTube page. Similarly Anthony presented Daml’s tech stack along with a live demonstration of Daml’s unique ability to be written once and deployed anywhere at Hyperledger Sweden's Tech Study Circle, Hyperledger NYC, and Hyperledger Boston. If you're into the more technical side check out the Hyperledger Sweden video, if you prefer higher level explanations the NYC and Boston presentations are great choices.

What We're Reading

KC Tam published a new article this month where he's diving deep into modeling an asset which is fungible, transferable, and trade-able.

Robert laid out one of Daml's best new features in his blog post explaining how to leverage multi-party submission to have an easier time using Daml. Multi-party submission effectively solves the issues of needing to provide many users with the same data, allowing for role-based access control, and even improving ledger initialization. Don't let the name fool you, this is a killer feature.

Not to be outdone György broke down all the different mental models we have around “blockchains” and “smart contracts” in his latest post where he rightfully puts these often confusing terms in quotes.

Community Feature and Bug Reports

We've had quite a few improvements to Daml this month thanks to our wonderful community.

First Zoraiz roouted our an issue in our docs that didn't specify a hard-coded limit of 255 characters for Party names. That is now fixed and documented. Then Khuram gave us a ton of feedback on Daml in general and our documentation. We're still working through it but Stefano has already started on some simple fixes to the docs. And Alexander rounds out the last of the reports this month with three great improvements to the docs.

Daml Connect 1.10 RC is out!

Highlights

• Daml Triggers and OAuth Middleware are now Stable
• Daml-LF 1.11 is now stable without any further changes from the beta version. It includes the following features and changes
  • Choice Observers
  • Generic Maps and DA.Map and DA.Set libraries are
  • Ledger API version is now at 1.9
• Daml Studio now provides tooltips and go-to-definition even if the code doesn’t currently compile
• Considerable performance improvements

Impact and Migration

• This release is purely additive so no action needs to be taken. We recommend testing projects with Daml-LF 1.11 or fixing Daml-LF version at 1.8 (the current default) at this point. Daml-LF 1.11 will become the default with the next release of Daml Connect.

The full release notes and installation instructions for Daml Connect 1.10.0 can be found here.

What’s Next

• Despite the order of magnitude performance improvements we have already accomplished, this continues to be one of our top priorities. 
• Improved exception handling in Daml is progressing well and expected to land in one of the next Daml-LF versions.
• We are continuing work on several features for the Enterprise Edition of Daml Connect:
  • A profiler for Daml, helping developers write highly performant Daml code.
  • A mechanism to verify cryptographic signatures on commands submitted to the Ledger API, improving security in deployment topologies where the Ledger API is provided as a service.
  • Oracle DB support throughout the Daml Connect stack in addition to the current PostgreSQL support.
• A new primitive data type in Daml that allows infinite precision arithmetic. This will make it much easier to perform accurate numeric tasks in Daml.