Blog: Daml

Most blockchains are built around transparency: smart contracts, transactions, and state changes are visible to everyone. That works well in many cases, but it becomes a problem when organizations need to coordinate without exposing sensitive data. The Canton Network takes a different approach. It is designed for privacy, data sovereignty, and interoperability, allowing participants to share only the information required for a given transaction. Canton applications are commonly built with Daml, a strongly typed functional smart contract language centered on parties, authorization, contracts, and multi-party workflows. In this article, we’ll introduce Canton and Daml, compare Daml with Solidity, and build a small banking application. Along the way, we’ll see how privacy and authorization requirements influence smart contract architecture.