Introduction

Purpose

Daml Finance supports the modeling of financial and non-financial use cases in Daml. It provides a standard way to represent assets on Daml ledgers and defines common behaviours and rules. There are two main benefits to using the library in your application:

• Shortened time-to-market

  Implementing basic financial concepts like ownership or economic terms of an asset is a complex and tedious task. By providing common building blocks, Daml Finance increases delivery velocity and shortens the time-to-market when building Daml applications. The rich set of functionality of Daml Finance is at your disposal so you don’t have to reinvent the wheel.

• Application composability

  Building your application on Daml Finance makes it compatible with other platforms in the wider ecosystem. By using a shared library assets become “mobile”, allowing them to be used seamlessly across application boundaries without the need for translation or integration layers. For instance, a Daml Finance-based asset that is originated in a bond issuance application can be used in the context of a secondary market trading application that is also built on Daml Finance.

Design Goals

Daml Finance optimizes for the following aspects:

• Accessibility

  The library is designed to have a low barrier to entry. Users familiar with Daml can get started quickly and leverage the provided functionality easily.

• Maintainability

  Building with Daml Finance decouples your application code from the underlying representation of assets. This allows the application to evolve without the need to migrate assets from one version to another, and makes maintenance easier.

• Extensibility

  Various extension points allow customization and extension of the library as required. If an existing implementation does not fulfill the requirements it is straightforward to provide a custom extension.

Scope

The library covers the following areas:

• Holdings: modeling of ownership structures, custodial relationships, intermediated securities, and accounts
• Instruments: structuring the economic terms of an asset and the events that govern its evolution
• Settlement: executing complex transactions involving multiple parties and assets
• Lifecycling: governing the evolution of financial instruments over their lifetime

Use Cases

Daml Finance comes with broad asset and workflow capabilities to allow for a variety of use cases to be modeled:

• Simple tokens: digital representation of traditional assets
• Central bank digital currency: retail or wholesale distribution models
• Standard asset classes: equities with corporate actions, bonds with flexible cash flow modeling
• Derivatives: time- and path-dependent derivatives with optionality
• Synchronized lifecycling: atomic, intermediated lifecycling and settlement of cash flows across investors and custodians
• Cross-entity issuance: atomic, multi-party issuance across investors, issuer, risk book, and treasury
• Asset-agnostic trading facility: generic delivery-vs-payment and immediate, guaranteed settlement
• Exotic asset types: non-fungible and non-transferable assets

Exploring the Library

If you want to review the Daml Finance codebase in more detail you can clone the repository locally on your machine. This allows you to navigate the code, including both the template definitions and the tests. In particular the tests are useful to show how the library works and how the different components interact with each other. If you need to view the code for a specific package release, you can check out the corresponding tag.

As a pre-requisite, the Daml SDK needs to be installed on your machine.

In order to download the repository, open a terminal and run:

git clone git@github.com:digital-asset/daml-finance.git

This creates a new folder daml-finance containing the Daml Finance source code. Navigate to the folder and run:

make build

This downloads all required packages and builds the project. You can then run:

daml studio

to open the code editor and inspect the code.