The first rule of Fight Club – if instead it was finance – is don’t leak client data.

That’s been a challenge to banks and financial firms that want to use blockchain technology to improve efficiency because, for the most part, blockchains sacrifice privacy for security. Transactions on Ethereum are public and if a user’s address is known so is her entire trading history. That simply won’t do on Wall Street, where allowing your positions to be known to competitors amounts to a fire-able death knell of shame.

The devotion to protecting proprietary data has created opportunities for firms like Digital Asset, which today released the newest version of its DAML platform and language. Digital Asset, which came to prominence in 2015 when it hired former JPMorgan banker Blythe Masters as chief executive, counts Goldman Sachs Group, ASX Group and Deutsche Börse among its clients (Masters left the firm in 2018).   

Its new software version includes a privacy layer called Canton that requires complex transactions to be done all at once, rather than in corresponding steps, so that sensitive information isn’t shared with anyone who doesn’t need to have that data.

“What we mean by privacy first is – in all systems – when you have complex transactions all data is shared to all of the parties of the transaction,” said Craig Blitz, chief product officer for Digital Asset. Using health care as an example, he said a payment that’s been approved by an insurance company to a doctor’s office from a bank shouldn’t result in the doctor knowing any bank account information. So, the multilevel transaction is split into many parts that protect the user’s privacy, but this runs the risk of errors being introduced during the process.

DAML is able to now do multi-part transactions instantaneously in what’s called an atomic transaction that doesn’t allow other participants to see the data from others and which either succeeds or fails as a way to sidestep the error-prone multi-step process, Blitz said.

Canton is “a privacy-enabled distributed ledger,” Blitz said. “That probably the biggest impact [DAML] 2.0 will have.”

The second effect from the new software version is an increased amount of interoperability between different blockchains or databases. Eric Saraniecki, a Digital Asset co-founder and head of strategic initiatives, recently told me that building a blockchain for only a set number of permissioned users wasted the potential network effect that blockchain brings to the table.

“To say, ‘great, I'm going to build a walled garden with limited participation and limited use beyond what I've dictated’ might be a good way to build a product,” he said in January. “It might be a reasonable way to build the start of a platform, but it's definitely not a way to build a network. And so I don't mind that people wanted to be careful about it, to experiment in safe ways, find ways to do it, but I have a problem when that's where it ends.”

Read More: Q&A With Eric Saraniecki of Digital Asset, the Man Who’s Lost More Bitcoin Than You Own

DAML 2.0 will allow for digital assets to move easily from one blockchain to another, Blitz said. That’s important because a Digital Asset client like Deutsche Börse, Germany’s largest stock exchange, count all of the world’s biggest banks and financial firms as customers and each has its own preference for what type of digital ledger it employs. The exchange is currently building a system called D7 that will digitize securities from their issuance all the way through to clearing.

“Deutsche Börse has a really large network of partners that they work with and those partners all have their own strategy around blockchain,” Blitz said. “They can’t predict how all the use cases are going to play out in the long term so they look at DAML and Canton together as providing them a means of guaranteeing that when they build a system … they will be able to create applications that can seamlessly connect the assets across those implementations.”

Digital Asset is running its software using smart contracts that are open source and anyone who wants to can create and run their own node. “Effectively what that is is a slice of the distributed ledger,” Blitz said. Digital Asset is currently working with Corda, Hyperledger Besu, Hyperledger Fabric, Oracle Database, PostgreSQL and VMware Blockchain.

“We could definitely extend this to Ethereum,” Blitz said. “We have integrations to add new blockchains.” Still, it’s not clear that Digital Asset with make DAML 2.0 available on Ethereum yet, he said.

The pseudonymity afforded by public blockchains like Ethereum isn’t important to most corporate clients, he said. They need to know who their customers are and who they are dealing with to comply with various regulations.

“These are enterprises that care about privacy,” Blitz said. “They’re all choosing their infrastructure, they’re all curious about what blockchain is about. They’re making different choices and they want to be future-proofed for ‘what if I want to do business with someone who chose a different infrastructure.’”