China’s Ant Financial Loves To Dabble In Blockchain

By Sumedha Bose

While the Chinese government has held up a ‘No Entry’ sign for cryptocurrencies in the country for a while now, it has shown extreme enthusiasm and drive when it comes to blockchain. We had reported earlier that Alibaba is on top of the blockchain game with most number of patents filed and it seems that the enthusiasm has not dwindled.

An affiliate of Alibaba, Ant Financial, is currently the biggest financial technology company in the world by value. It seems that this company has been leading the way in China when it comes to the using blockchain technology in the field of digital payments.

Through its digital payment service Alipay, Ant Financial has established its dominance over the entire Chinese market. Additionally, it has also been extremely proactive when it comes to experimenting with emerging technologies such as blockchainartificial intelligence and quantum computing.

Hui Zhang, director of Ant Financial’s blockchain division, has said that the company’s vision is to build the “industrial internet.” According to him, there is space in the Chinese market right now for applications that run on these technologies, and provide a more efficient way to connect and share sensitive data. He believes that digital services in the Chinese market have a lot of room to improve.

The firm was valued at $150 billion back in 2018, and it has come up with its own proprietary blockchain platform. Zhang believes that the market needs a “better collaboration network.” This they plan to achieve via the use of blockchain technology.

Ant Financial has been using the technology for some time now to develop and support several applications. To state a few- one that tracks physical items like elements of a supply chain, one that keeps tabs on charity donations (around $50 million so far), one for tracking , another one that allows for rapid cross-border payments in Asia.

The firm has also been developing applications for Hyperledger, and a private version of Ethereum. The company has ambitious plans concerning blockchain and its applications in the Chinese market, in specific.

Sumedha Bose

Sumedha uses words as her crutch to get by in life. She takes a keen interest in debating, dancing and destroying the patriarchy in her free time.

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