E-commerce giant Alibaba continues to prove that it is one of the most active enterprises in the blockchain space with 470 blockchain patents filed last year. On 16th April, they made a greater step forward with the announcement of its fintech branch, Ant Financial, on launching OpenChain, a consortium blockchain platform allowing small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and developers to deploy blockchain-powered smart contracts and decentralized apps (DApps) with higher efficiency and lower costs.
“Through the launch of the OpenChain platform, we aim to help one million SMEs and developers innovate and explore more use cases in the next three years”, shared Jin Ge, General Manager of Blockchain Platforms at Ant Financial.
According to the announcement, OpenChain will support SMEs and developers to utilize multi-party collaboration in approaching products related to supply chain finance, product provenance, digital invoices, and charitable donations. These use cases require not only a reliable trust mechanism among all parties, but also high-performance consensus algorithms.
OpenChain began its alpha testing in 2019 and since then, WhiteMatrix, the provider of individual developer and enterprise blockchain application development services, has been using the platform. Wu Xiao, founder and CEO of WhiteMatrix, expressed his compliment:
“Not only are OpenChain’s transaction speeds several times faster than public blockchain platforms like Ethereum, but the cost per transaction is only one-tenth of others”, Wu shared.
Backed by the government, Chinese technology giants are sprinting their way to launching their own blockchain platforms. Earlier this year, China announced plans to implement its nationwide blockchain network, and the country recently established its first provincial-level Blockchain Innovation Alliance in Chongqing.
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