Digital Asset Holdings, a New York based startup focused on developing of distributed ledger technology for the financial services industry, today announced that the acquisition of Zurich-based technology firm Elevence Digital Finance AG (Elevence).

In addition to the acquisition, Digital Asset also announced the Digital Asset Modeling Language (DAML), a privacy preserving yet provable alternative to Smart Contracts designed specifically for financial services. DAML codifies rights and obligations in a similar manner to traditional legal contracts and workflows, and is more easily interpretable by a non-technical audience than most programming languages.

Elevence has already developed an expressive language for financial institutions to model and execute agreements with certainty and finality. It is capable of expressing any right or obligation, including cash, securities and derivatives, whereby the code defines the considerations between parties, and determines how these contractual relations can evolve over time.

Digital Asset has been working closely with Elevence for the last few months to begin integrating the technology with its stack. Elevence’s technology complements Digital Asset's existing software by providing a new, verifiable way for parties to a transaction to independently prove updates to a distributed ledger while preserving data confidentiality.

“With this acquisition, we will harness the power of Elevence’s technology and its team of talented individuals to enhance our offering for the financial services industry,” said Blythe Masters, CEO of Digital Asset. “The resulting Digital Asset platform is specifically designed to address financial services applications requiring automation, privacy and immutability.”

The respective teams of the two companies will join forces, thereby significantly increasing Digital Asset’s technical team, while expanding its European presence with the opening of a Zurich office. Elevence Chief Executive Officer, Dr. Vincent Peikert, will join Digital Asset as Head of Digital Asset Switzerland and Head of Product for Europe, and Dr. James Litsios, Chief Technology Officer, will become Head of Development, Switzerland.

“Digital Asset is recognized as a leading provider of distributed ledger technology and has a remarkable team developing and deploying cutting-edge software for financial institutions,” said Vincent Peikert, CEO of Elevence. “This makes the company an ideal partner for Elevence, and joining forces will enable us to offer the broadest portfolio of solutions to the benefit of our customers.”