Chinese banking behemoth Ant Financial is opening up its proprietary blockchain platform to small businesses and developers to help in the creation of multi-user trust-based digital applications.
Ant Financial’s OpenChain provides developers with dozens of readily available modules and smart contracts 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.
"Applications of blockchain technology have ballooned over the past few years,” says 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."
He boasts that the bank runs the largest productivity blockchain platform in China with the ability to process and support one billion user accounts and one billion transactions every day.
WhiteMatrix, a provider of individual developer services as well as enterprise blockchain app services, has been using OpenChain to develop smart contracts for developers since the platform began its initial alpha testing in 2019.
Wu Xiao, the founder and CEO of WhiteMatrix, says: “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.”