Digital Asset Holdings Funding Round Brings Forth $120 Million

Digital Asset Holdings, an enterprise blockchain firm, has raised $120 million in a Series D funding round, backed by investment firms 7Ridge and Eldridge. The new round brings the company’s overall funding to over $300 million.

With the new funding, Digital Asset plans to grow its team by 50% this year and launch a new interoperability protocol that allows data to flow seamlessly across blockchains and conventional databases. Notably, 7Ridge’s Carsten Kengeter and Veronica Augustsson have joined the board of Digital Asset.

Expanding Digital Asset’s Services

The company’s main product, open-source DAML smart contract language, can synchronize data on both blockchains and centralized databases. Its clientele ranges from the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) to the Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing.

Yuval Rooz, co-founder and CEO of Digital Asset mentioned that workflows could not be shared privately and securely within and across organizations without DAML, resulting in inconsistent data, expensive to adapt architectures and a lack of a standard interface.

Digital Asset’s client base tripled last year, with non-blockchain implementations accounting for half of the new business. They also reported a lot of interest in using DAML to address internal data silos within enterprises. As a result, the company added support for ten different underlying ledgers including conventional databases, to their product range.

Creating A Better Experience

The distributed ledger framework, expected to be implemented by the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) in 2023, is perhaps Digital Asset’s most high-profile project. Compared to ASX’s current CHESS system, the new system developed using DAML and the ISO 20022 protocol, is expected to provide better performance, durability, and stability, as well as new functions.

Digital Asset also provides DABL, a hosting platform for developers to deploy their DAML scripts into output. DABL helps to abstract away the implementation, management, and scaling of distributed applications, acting as a live environment for apps that include flows between individuals, companies, and markets.

Blockchain Adoption is on the Rise

The concept of blockchain is no longer vague as its adoption has been on the rise as more of its use cases are coming into play. In a 2020 Deloitte survey, 39% of respondents said they had already put blockchain into production, compared to 23% in 2019. For companies with more than $1 billion in sales, the production rate was even higher, at 46%. 

Based on blockchain, the company’s vision is for a world with various systems, each driven by infrastructure tailored to their specific needs, like nothing before. They want to take DAML to the next level with the additional support, building a global ecosystem of interconnected, heterogeneous technologies linked by a standard protocol. Often, regardless of the underlying technologies, the business is paving the way for the future of how disparate systems can interact.