Chinese Internet Giant Baidu Launches Blockchain-as-a-Service Platform
Chinese internet behemoth Baidu has recently launched its blockchain-as-a-service (BaaS) product, calling it the “most easy to understand” blockchain service in the business.
History of Innovation: China and Blockchain
As per Baidu, this platform was based on the organization’s internal developments, and it can make and follow exchanges identified with cryptocurrency standards, digital bills, bank credit administration, insurance administration, and financial analysis.
A site for the recently discharged innovation depicts it as a “self-developed project” that can be utilized for:
“Efficient and low-cost traceability and trading, ideal for digital currency, payment and settlement, digital ticketing, bank credit management, equity proof and exchange-traded securities, insurance management, financial auditing and more.”
This launch is viewed as a move to battle its Chinese adversary Tencent, which officially revealed its own BaaS service a couple of months prior.
“We independently developed a complete set of bottom-layer blockchain protocols and actively participated in the formulation of credible blockchain standards for China Institute of Information and Communications,” said Guo Rui, Tencent’s Vice President of Payment Platforms and Financial Applications, in a gathering in Chengdu in November 2017.
Guo also stated that blockchain business has entered a period where innovation and applications are adequately integrated together.
Baidu says the product has been connected to the tasks of, “asset securitization and asset exchange [and] has contributed to the first asset-backed securities exchange products using blockchain technology in China.”
The organization touts its adaptability, which it says will make the platform appropriate to a wide variety of applications. Baidu has additionally led an exploration into blockchain innovation in the fields of unmanned vehicles, AI, IoT, and distributed computing.
The firm has apparently been investigating blockchain innovation FinTech applications since 2015, and in 2013 it reported that it would acknowledge bitcoin as the sole method of payment from clients for its security platform Jiasule. Outside of Baidu and Tencent, Chinese tech mammoth Alibaba is additionally spending time building up its particular blockchain innovation.
“We have a team specifically to study that,” said Alibaba’s founder and chairman Jack Ma in a CNBC interview in December 2017. “We’ve spent a lot of efforts on blockchain technology at Alibaba.”
Alibaba’s Ant Financial already utilized blockchain innovation (in Chinese) on its donation platform in Alipay back in July 2016.
AliHealth, Alibaba’s health application offshoot, has likewise propelled a health administration in collaboration with Changzhou city government to coordinate blockchain innovation with the city’s doctors’. The framework stores and transmits medicinal information using encryption security.
With Baidu’s blockchain platform launch today, the three leading tech firms in China have now entered the worldwide blockchain rush.
