Ant Financial, the branch of Chinese multinational tech company Alibaba, has launched its consortium blockchain platform for small and micro enterprises (SME).
The platform called OpenChain is aimed to help both developers and small businesses to use blockchain applications for fewer costs while maintaining “higher efficiency”, says the official announcement.
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Jin Ge, the general manager of blockchain platforms at Ant Financial, added that since the usage of decentralized applications has grown over the past few years, the company plans to make it better available for smaller companies:
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.
Shift to the smaller companies
The company claims that reduced costs of dApp development and deployment help small and micro companies or separate developers to better focus on their product and service delivery.
As reported in the announcement, the blockchain platform provides users with dozens of readily available modules of decentralized applications (dApps), that can be used in various combinations.
The developers will be able to collaborate on applications including areas like supply chain finance, product provenance, electronic bills, decentralized games, copyright protection or charitable donations.
The company claims, that such use cases require a trust mechanism among all parties as well as high-performance consensus algorithms that can complete authentication computation on the fly.
The OpenChain project began its initial alpha testing last year. Since then White Matrix, a provider of dApp development services, has been using the platform to develop smart contracts. According to Wu Xiao, the founder and CEO of WhiteMatrix, transaction speed on the OpenChain platform is several times faster than on public platforms like Ethereum. He added, that the cost per transaction in one-tenth of others.
Creating easy-to-access blockchain solutions for small and micro enterprises is currently a trending topic in China. Major Chinese tech firms, such as Baidu and Tencent are launching their own blockchain platforms.
