Alibaba is China's Internet financial services company. Alibaba began as Alipay, a third-party payment platform on the online shopping website Taobao, and in 2014, Alibaba Group formed Zhejiang Ant Small and Micro Financial Services Group Co. By 2021, Ant Financial Services has been valued at $150 billion, which makes it the second-largest company in the world.

Ant blockchain: creating core technology to facilitate the development of digital economy

In addition, Yu Shan, senior technical expert of Ant Group, argues that the good and evil of technology is not determined by the technology itself, it is determined by the people who use the technology and the way they use it. In terms of food, clothing, housing and transport, blockchain brings numerous conveniences and provides the public with increased safety, he said.

  When it comes to blockchain, someone calls it a cipher that will change the future of the IT world, and others refer to it as a tool to lure people into committing crimes. Admittedly, as a new application mode of computer technology such as distributed data storage, peer-to-peer transmission, consensus mechanism, encryption algorithm and so on, blockchain has been deeply applied to the scenarios of information security, billing business, payment and settlement, identity/account authentication, origin traceability and so on, and is influencing the real and virtual economy more and more profoundly.

In response, Yu Shan, senior technologist of Ant Group, believes that the good and evil of technology is not determined by the technology itself, it is determined by whom and how the technology is used. He said that in terms of food, clothing, housing and transport, blockchain has brought a lot of convenience and made the people feel more at ease. In terms of the real economy, blockchain technology has brought a lot of positivity and goodness. Regarding the virtual economy, although it is controversial, blockchain promotes the innovation of financial models to a certain extent. From the perspective of long-term development, a series of regulatory policies introduced by governments on blockchain will help blockchain technology bring continuous positive implications to economic development.

Shan Yu, Senior Technologist, Head of R&D of Antchain Blockchain Service (BaaS). He worked at IBM for ten years, engaged in the development of SOA enterprise middleware, microservices cloud platform, blockchain, etc. As the technical leader of IBM MQ, he supported numerous major clients of governments, banks, and financial institutions in China and Asia-Pacific.In 2017, he joined Aliyun and engaged in the product research and development and solution design related to container services.In 2018, Yu Shan began to lead the team in the creation of the Blockchain Chain Service, Blockchain as a Service (BaaS), which achieved a global launch. As the leader of BaaS product development in Ant Group's digital technology line, Yu Shan's team is committed to do commercialisation output of BaaS to various industries in the national and even global markets, as well as to use it as a technology platform to support various business applications based on the upper layer of blockchain in Ant's digital technology.

global leadership in the layout of blockchain

In 2015, the team of blockchain was established within Ant Group in the form of an interest group. In 2018, Ant's Blockchain as a Service, i.e., BaaS, was launched globally. and in the year of 2019, Ant Group's BaaS was recognised by Gartner, outperforming some of the international, earlier-investing and well-established international vendors of that time in the professional rating. In 2021 and 2022, Ant Chain was ranked No. 1 in IDC's China BaaS Vendor Market Share Report for two consecutive years.In 2022, Forrester released its China Enterprise Blockchain Platform Report, and Ant Chain was uniquely selected for the Leaders Quadrant. In the past 5 years, Antchain has been ranked first in the world in terms of patents applied for in the blockchain field, and ranked first in the world in terms of patents granted for two consecutive years, and has landed more than 80 business scenarios of solutions in various industries.

Yu Shan indicates that the blockchain system is a collection of a series of complex underlying technologies, equivalent to the engine, transmission, transmission, shock absorbers, electronic equipment, etc. that make up a car, while BaaS gathers underlying technologies to provide a standard commercially deliverable, safe, reliable, high-performance mass-produced car to be delivered to customers. The absence of BaaS requires enterprise customers to face many challenges and risks, such as purchasing and long-term management and maintenance of multiple underlying cloud resources and cloud services by themselves. Applied enterprises also require a high level of blockchain technical competence, resulting in high manpower costs, as well as unavoidable investment in secondary development, resulting in prolonged on-line cycles for blockchain-based new businesses. In addition, enterprises have to deal with greater risks in terms of information security and production stability on their own.

BaaS allows blockchain capabilities to be standardised and made ready to use , as well as being more secure and stable. The " ready-to-serve" format also brings customers lower delivery and operation and maintenance costs, reduced time and labour costs, allowing customers to focus on the business itself and accelerate the launch of new business.

Insist on self-research and establish unique technological advantages

Over the years, Ant Chain consistently adheres to self-research core technologies and has accumulated unique technology advancements and major advantages as it has been refined in a large number of business scenarios. In terms of the most important production stability and reliability capability of commercialised enterprise-level products, Ant Chain has adopted up to 25 high availability and stability technologies. Over the past 4 years of commercialisation, Ant Chain has supported the operation of hundreds of production chains of customers from various industries every day, processed hundreds of millions of production business transactions and experienced the test of Double Eleven for many years. Which is an outstanding advantage of Ant Chain over other blockchain manufacturers.

As for security and privacy protection, Ant Chain has constructed a cloud-BaaS-chain multi-level security system with a total of 58 security technology capabilities. Such as self-developed hardware TEE privacy protection technology, software-hardware all-in-one machine and self-developed security hardware, software version of privacy protection technology (homomorphic encryption, zero-knowledge proof), contract security testing (static analysis, fuzzy test, formal proof), chain security random number, post-quantum cipher etc..

When it comes to the ability to scale, from the perspectives of performance, scalability, cost, and complex scene networking, it has parallel pipeline technology, blockchain high-speed communication network BTN, flexible networking with multi-type subchains, LETUS storage engine, self-developed purely asynchronous consensus algorithm, and multi-geographic fast networking, etc. Supporting a billion-level account size and a billion daily transaction amounts.

As for trusted cross-chain, Ant Chain has developed its own secure and trusted cross-chain, supports TEE hardware-level cross-chain privacy protection, features high-performance cross-chain message processing of 100,000 messages per second, and leads the development of IEEE international cross-chain communication standards.

As for development friendliness, AntChain offers support for five mainstream contract programming languages, while providing EVM and WASM type VMs with high performance WASM JIT capability, online Cloud IDE and local AntChain Studio, as well as a developer centre and an open alliance chain.

In terms of innovative data services, Ant Chain's new ChainInsight data insight service is equipped with the ability to search tens of billions of on-chain transactions, along with second-level real-time statistical analysis technology.

In the integration of new technologies, the combination of blockchain and privacy computing realises privacy collaboration, and comprehensively integrates secure multi-party computing, federated learning, TEE confidential computing, full homomorphic encryption, verifiable computing, and zero-knowledge proof. The combination of blockchain and AIoT achieves trusted uplinking of IoT devices through MaaS communication module, and the quantity of the uplinked devices has exceeded 5 million with the new energy industry.

Global Blockchain Key Technology Status and Diversity

When it comes to the different development of global blockchain technology, Yu Shan indicated that globally, the focus is on digital currency/token and Web3 applications, which are mostly oriented to the application scenarios of consumers. In terms of technology, the main focus is on the type of non-permission chain (permissionless chain), where ethereum's ecosystem accounts for a high proportion, while other blockchain technologies are also booming, such as new public chains, Layer2 technology, cross-chain technology, and asset-oriented contract programming languages, and etc.

In China, the majority of application scenarios are focused on serving the real economy and targeting enterprise- and government-side customers, and the types of application scenarios are significantly more varied compared to those abroad. In addition, the top management of the country attaches great importance to it strategically, including Chinese President Xi Jinping's important speech on blockchain, blockchain being written into the National 14th Five-Year Plan, and blockchain innovation and application pilots implemented by 16 ministries and commissions. As for technology, the permissioned chain type (permissioned chain) is the main focus, and the research focus includes the ability to scale, privacy and security, cross-chain interoperability, and fusion with other technologies to form a comprehensive solution, etc., and it is often positioned as an industry-level, regional-level, or even national-level platform or infrastructure in terms of landing.

"Domestic and foreign areas of concern for blockchain are different, while foreign countries focus on the expansion of the public chain and lower transaction costs, etc., our country focuses on massive infrastructure, the applicability of the technology varies, both have their own leading edge. However, the licensed chain and the non-licensed chain are not distinct from each other, but are learning from each other and integrating with each other." Yushan said.

With today's economic ecosystem, Alibaba Group and Ant Group as well as their partners and customers have a very wide range of extensive industry application scenarios, making it the most core driving force for blockchain in the real economy. It was reported that the ant chain has already landed in more than 80 scenarios.

In the operation scenario of "Chery Commercial Vehicle Data Uploading and Optimisation", Ant Chain can upload vehicle data to optimise the overall operation of commercial vehicle logistics; "Whale Exploration Digital Collections" launched by Ant Group also uses blockchain technology to support the realisation of digital collections, allowing traditional culture to be in digital form for more collectors and enterprises to collect or transfer in a compliant manner. Ant Group presents "Whaletan Digital Collections", which also uses blockchain technology to support the realisation of digital collections, so that traditional culture in digital form can be collected by more collectors and enterprises as well as transferred in a compliant manner. The "Magpie Copyright Protection" uses blockchain technology to protect original product images on e-commerce platforms from being stolen and abused by unscrupulous merchants; and in the field of government affairs, the "Jiangxi Province Government GanFuitong E-Certificate" scenario uses blockchain to realise electronic certificates to provide convenient government services. The "Zhejiang Province Department of Finance Blockchain Medical E-Ticket" helps Zhejiang Province establish a medical e-ticket using blockchain, making medical treatment and post-medical reimbursement more convenient and efficient; the "DJI Agricultural Drone Financing and Leasing Project" uses blockchain technology to make the information about drone equipment better able to communicate credibly between the equipment provider, the user and the financing financial institution, so that the status of such equipment and the financing application process can be online and credible. The "DaJiang Agricultural Drone Financing and Leasing Project" uses blockchain technology to ensure that information about drone equipment can flow credibly between the equipment provider, the user and the financing financial institution, so that the state of the equipment and the process of financing application can be online and credible. Furthermore, there are "Trusple international trade fulfilment platform", "GSBN global shipping alliance", "Fucha network origin traceability" etc, "China Railway Emergency Equipment Financing and Leasing" and many other projects, which means that the application of ant chain has penetrated into various industries.

In the past couple of years, the depth, width, and openness of blockchain applications in the real economy and society have been accelerating. Prospectively, Yu Shan believes that blockchain will usher in a wider network scale, especially in scenarios and areas involving government affairs. Secondly, multi-organisation collaboration will become more widespread and more joint business scenarios (marketing/risk control/financing/government services) will emerge, with blockchain being the most important catalyst. Third, blockchain and enterprise information technology as well as business processes will integrate more profoundly. Since the success of blockchain in enterprise applications cannot be achieved by one technology on its own, it requires integration with other large-scale enterprise informatisation technologies. Fourth, cross-chain, interoperability, and networking technologies between cross-vendor and cross-type blockchains are expected to become more popular. Fifth, more diverse types of digital assets will be flowing on the chain.

"I would like the future of blockchain to be not an independent industry, but to be needed by all industries, when people mention multiple enterprises collaborating, they think of blockchain. Its equivalent of a standard piece that could be used in various technologies and scenarios." Yu Shan said.

Alibaba's fundamental attribute is science and technology, with its strategy inevitably revolving around solving the most central business technology proposition in the digital economy. The essence of blockchain is trusted multi-party collaboration, which is one of the most core key technologies to achieve upstream, downstream and horizontal multi-party collaboration in the industry digitalisation and to realise a trusted value flow network. Therefore, Alibaba's long-term investment in blockchain is very determined. The national strategic layout and planning of a series of blockchain also confirms Alibaba's insistence on " believe in it, therefore we see it".