Alibaba’s Ant Financial announced the launch date of enterprise blockchain

By Dorothy 01/9/20 6:08 AM

Chinese payment service Ant Financial – a subsidiary of e-commerce giant Alibaba and the operator of Alipay, is used by more than half of the Chinese population. Yesterday, it announced its February launch date for an enterprise blockchain that experts believe could pave the way for mass technology adoption.

An affiliate of electronics giant Alibaba, Ant Financial is the most valuable fintech company in the world. Speaking at an annual media meeting, Ant Financial Vice President Guofei Jiang said its blockchain platform aims to help small and micro businesses participate in the industry and develop blockchain applications at a lower cost.

Guofei Jiang announced the news at the company’s annual media meeting. The blockchain platform, named Ant Blockchain Open Alliance, has been available in beta form since November last year. He added that the platform could support 1 billion daily transactions and could achieve 100,000 cross-chain information processing capabilities per second.

Guofei said that 1,005 patents have joined this platform and it has proven its use as a method of resolving trusted issues in more than 40 scenarios, including cross-border money transfers, supply chain finance, as a means of judicial deposit, and an electronic bill payment method.

Guofei said that with the development of the digital economy, industrial cooperation will become more frequent and more complex, which will create more opportunities for blockchain.

Ant Blockchain Open Alliance was launched in November, with the main goals being low-cost, low-threshold, reliable, and multi-value networks. While the name of the platform includes the word open, Ant Financial’s chief technology officer, Jieli Li, said at the time, not everyone could run network nodes.

Chinese companies have been enthusiastic about blockchain. All of the country’s big tech giants – Alibaba, Yahoo, JD, and Tencent, – have announced or launched their blockchain platforms. Earlier this week, Baidu released a public beta for the open network “Xuperchain”. The network allowed users to deploy a blockchain application for as little as 1 Chinese yuan (~ $ 0.14) until March. Tencent and JD have also published white pages on blockchain platforms as their recommended services.

Ant Financial joins a chain of 10 million partners with ZKP blockchain privacy solutions firm

Ant Financial, the financial arm of Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba, participated in round A worth $ 10 million for QEDIT, an Israeli blockchain security solutions company develops zero-knowledge proof (ZKP) technology. The news was reported daily by Israel Calcalist’s business report on May 7, 2019.

Series A is led by MizMaa Ventures, and its closure was announced in collaboration with Ant Financial, the major software company VMWare and RGAX, a subsidiary of Reinsurance Group of the United States.