Chinese giant Ant Group has unveiled AntChain, a new technology brand for the financial firm's blockchain platform that also aggregates other digital technologies including AI, Internet of Things (IoT) and secure computation.
Ant Group-operated Alipay holds the most blockchain patents worldwide with 212 patents as of May 14, 2020. The firm has been investing in the technology since 2015 and claims more than 50 use cases cases, typically involving multi-party collaboration, including IT leasing, global shipping, medical insurance claim processing, cross-border remittance, and charitable donations.
The technology stack has the ability to process and support one billion user accounts and one billion transactions every day. Currently, over 100 million digital assets are uploaded onto AntChain on average every day.
Geoff Jiang, Ant Group VP, says: “With the launch of the AntChain brand, we look forward to contributing to the acceleration of blockchain-enabled industry transformations, and to working with our partners to make blockchain technology more accessible for users, as well as creating tangible value for SMEs, consumers and clients across a spectrum of industries.”
Ant Group also took the wraps off AntChain Station, an all-in-one workstation that the firm claims reduces the deployment time of the technology by as much as 90%.
Approximately the size of a laptop, the workstationis designed to accelerate the deployment of AntChain’s applications, with baked-in hardware encryption acceleration for privacy-preserving computation and enhanced security algorithms.
Previously, deploying AntChain involved installing a set of software and preparing the computation environment on general-purpose hardware. The new AntChain Station offers users an integrated alternative, combining built-in software and a dedicated hardware accelerator.
On the same day, Ant Group also signed a strategic agreement with Dell, Hewlett-Packard and Lenovo to make IT leasing services more accessible for SMEs through the use of AntChain. Earlier in May, Ant Group formed a similar partnership with Intel.