Ant Financial Opens Consortium Blockchain Platform to SMEs and Developers

HANGZHOU, China--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Ant Financial today announced the launch of OpenChain, a blockchain platform that enables small and micro enterprises (SMEs) and developers to tap into Ant Financial’s proprietary consortium of blockchain technologies and deploy blockchain-powered smart contracts and decentralized apps (DApps) with higher efficiency and lower cost.

"Applications of blockchain technology have ballooned over the past few years,” said Jin Ge, General Manager of Blockchain Platforms at Ant Financial. “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."

Ant Financial’s OpenChain provides developers with dozens of readily available modules that can be used in various combinations to build trust in multi-party collaborations, including in areas such as supply chain finance, product provenance, digital invoices and charitable donations. This helps to greatly reduce development and deployment costs for SMEs and developers, allowing them to focus on product and service delivery.

OpenChain features industry-leading blockchain technologies developed by Ant Financial to build trust in commercial and transactional use cases, the success of which typically depends on multi-party collaboration. These use cases require not only a trust mechanism among all parties, but also high-performance consensus algorithms that can complete authentication computation on the fly. Ant Financial’s OpenChain also uses trusted computing capabilities to enhance data security and protection for the apps running on its platform. A modular design makes it easy for SMEs and developers to start with a basic app and upgrade later as the business grows.

WhiteMatrix, a provider of individual developer services as well as enterprise blockchain app development services, has been using OpenChain to develop smart contracts for developers since the platform began its initial alpha testing in 2019.

“We are excited to partner with Ant Financial’s OpenChain," said Wu Xiao, the founder and CEO of WhiteMatrix. “The platform offers efficient blockchain development services, facilitates cost-effective smart contracts, and lowers the entry barrier for developers. 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.”

Ant Financial Blockchain is the largest productivity blockchain platform in China with the ability to process and support one billion user accounts and one billion transactions every day. It has topped the global ranking for blockchain patent applications for the past three consecutive years ⁽¹⁾.

About Ant Financial

Ant Financial Services Group is dedicated to using technology to bring the world equal opportunities. Our technologies, including blockchain, artificial intelligence, security, Internet of Things and computing empower us and our ecosystem partners to serve the unbanked and underbanked, bringing more secure, transparent, cost-effective and inclusive financial services to individuals and small and micro-sized individual customer and small businesses worldwide.

Ant Financial has formed international partnerships with global strategic partners to serve local users in those markets, and we serve Chinese travelers overseas by connecting Alipay with online and offline merchants. Brands under Ant Financial include Alipay, Ant Fortune, MYbank, and WorldFirst. For more information on Ant Financial, please visit our website at www.antfin.com or follow us on Twitter @AntFinancial.

(1) Based on research conducted by IPRdaily (2019, 2018 and 2017, in Chinese).