Alibaba is set to enter the blockchain crypto-verse with Ant Financial, the finanical affiliate of the Chinese e-commerce company. Ant Financial aims to use blockchain as the base for Backend-as-a-Service (BaaS) platform they are building.
Jiang Guoefei, Vice President at Ant Finanical, announced this on September 20, at the Ant Technology Exploration Conference (ATEC) held in Hangzhou.
Furthermore, with the platform, Ant wants to spread its tools to everyone in the commercial sector. He stated, “In the past two years, Ant Financial has been working on two aspects about blockchain. One is to improve the technology. And the other is to open it up and accelerate the commercialization of blockchain applications.“.
About the BaaS Platform
The focus of Ant Financial with this platform will be enterprise. Furthermore, they will launch an “Ant Blockchain Partnership Program”. With this approach, Ant wants to get all small and medium-scaled businesses on blockchain. Furthermore, they aim to provide them with solutions through implementing blockchain.
This will help these business implement blockchain by not delving deep into the domain. Rather, they’ll be able to use simplistic and practical blockchain solutions.
In this year’s summer, Ant Financial successfully made the trial of its first cross-border blockchain-based payment. AliPayHK, the Hong Kong division of Alibaba’s payment app, AliPay, was used to make the payment. Furthermore, the payment went successfully to Philippine based payment app, GCash.
Furthermore, for developing their blockchain solutions, a $14 billion funding was granted to Ant Financial. Also, Jack Ma, Founder of Alibaba, has been keen about the decentralized technology. The project has involved him for quite a few years now.
Most noteworthy, Alibaba has filed for the most number of patents related to blockchain technology. It filed an astounding 90 patents beating IBM also.
As the ecommerce giant makes it way into the domain, it is worth noting how the process unfolds gradually.