Solve Data Synchronization Challenges with Blockchain & Smart Contracts

David Richards, a Product Manager at Digital Asset, presents solutions to enterprise data synchronization challenges using blockchain and smart contracts. Rather than focusing on blockchain's trustlessness properties, the talk emphasizes data synchronization as the critical challenge in enterprise systems. The core problem is data silos: different applications and organizations maintain separate, inconsistent views of shared information, which prevents digital transformation by blocking real-time access to trusted data, automation of processes, and rapid adaptation. A simple example—a patient visiting a doctor—involves seven to ten parties (hospitals, insurance companies, banks) that must coordinate data and transactions. Current integration approaches (emails, message queues, APIs, data warehouses) all work after data is created, causing synchronization failures where parties develop conflicting views of truth. The proposed solution is a 'virtual shared system of record' that integrates data at the database layer using an API ensuring secure synchronization. This requires four elements: explicit data ownership, strong permission controls, privacy, and fault tolerance preventing parties from maliciously altering each other's data without agreement. Digital Asset provides DAML (the 'demo' language per the transcript), a schema for parties to agree on shared rules, modeled similarly to object-oriented programming with data properties, methods, and authorization rules built in (specifying signatories, observers, and controllers). Each transaction creates an immutable event log; parties see only events relevant to them. DAML Drivers abstracts the consensus layer, supporting multiple underlying technologies (blockchains, distributed ledgers, or standard databases). A key benefit is composability: multiple applications can operate on shared data without modification. For example, a loan application can mediate transactions between IOU and cash applications without those apps knowing about each other, creating network effects. The approach addresses three digital transformation requirements: a golden source of truth, elimination of manual reconciliation, and rapid composition of new applications. Digital Asset provides open-source DAML technology and DAML Hub, a managed service for faster deployment, with an active community on discuss.daml.com. Current use is primarily in the financial sector.