Alibaba Cloud BaaS To Go Global

Alibaba, the Chinese multinational conglomerate which focuses on aspects like e-commerce, retail, Internet, AI and technology, on 24th October, officially announced their plans to extend their Blockchain-as-a-Service (BaaS) product into the USA, Europe and South East Asia, on their cloud-computing arms- Alibaba Cloud.

The BaaS service which had been launched in China, in August, has a proven track record of logistics, public benefits system, and medical industries. It is an enterprise-level platform service based on two leading blockchain platforms- Hyperledger Fabric and Ant Blockchain, the former being a blockchain framework implementation by The Linux Foundation and the latter being a high-performing blockchain developed by Ant Financial, Alibaba’s financial service affiliate.

Brian Behlendorf, the Executive Director of Hyperlegder, said,

“We’re delighted to see the launch of Alibaba Cloud BaaS powered by Hyperledger Fabric as we’ve already seen many Hyperledger use cases in production this year. As stated in MIIT’s recent whitepaper, 2018 is set to be another blockbuster year for the industry with record amount of capital to be injected into companies in the space, and Hyperledger is committed to the development of blockchain technologies in China. Together with Alibaba Cloud, we look forward to bringing more exciting innovations to the global blockchain communities.”

The Alibaba Cloud Baas service uses Intel SGX security technology, which protects both data and code from possible external cyber attacks. It is capable of supporting a selection of applications like smart contracts and automatic deployment along with a range of monitoring, operating and maintenance functions. It also provides services like consortium blockchain management, user and certificate management, and SDK applications. BaaS’s security is handled by a “trusted computing and a secure consortium blockchain network”, and provides a trustworthy framework for businesses across various industries.

After the successful reception of BaaS in China, Alibaba is now looking forward to taking it to the global market, a move that will thus see them in competition with counter-giants like Microsoft Azure, Oracle, and Amazon Web Services (AWS), in the global cloud BaaS market, which is estimated to reach a valuation of 7 billion USD, very soon.

Rishma Banerjee

Rishma is currently pursuing a bachelor’s degree in International Relations and has a special place in her life for sifting through all sorts of random trivia, thank you very much.