Why it’s so hard to adopt blockchain technology in everyday life? Ant Financial believes there are three challenges

Note: In China, the concept of blockchain became a hot topic since 2015 and the year of 2017 has been publicly hailed as “The Year of Blockchain”. In reality,

however, it’s no easy to put blockchain in practical use. Huxiu and Ant Financial recently held a gathering of industrial players under the theme of “What’s the first step towards the application of blockchain”, discussing how to foster further development of blockchain technology in 2017. Three more gatherings are under preparation to analyze the current situation in financial services.

Tong Ling, chief architect of Ant Financial, shared some examples about how they applied blockchain technology in their projects. Here is her speech.

Key challenges of blockchain-based applications

I believe everyone present today is wondering how come it’s so hard to put blockchain technology in practical use. When adding blockchain technology to the donation section, we were subject to three challenges.

First, how to manage asset on blockchain?

While bitcoin network is secure and closed, blockchain network cannot be completely closed if we want to make it work for financial services. So when it comes to asset management on blockchain, how can we make data real and reliable?

Second, how to make information on blockchain easy to observe?

At Ant Financial, we make an open source database browser and visual display of data available to all partners to increase transparency on blockchain.

Third, how to settle transactions efficiently?

When experimenting blockchain technology with charity, we are having a hard time in processing donations efficiently.

What we did is to separate transaction processing from consensus. In terms of consensus, we have been hindered by some technical problems like the distributed cooperative optimization of PBFT in the cluster settings.

At Ant Financial, we believe in individual privacy and we are compatible with a public or private cloud environment and strong in processing GPS data. As of the first half of 2017, we will reveal more details about out blockchain-based platforms providing services through SaaS.

Standards for blockchain platforms

A growing number of people are becoming interested in utilizing blockchain tech to change the current business models. The real question is how to choose a right blockchain-based platform? Based on what we have learned I suggest that you should consider the following factors.

First, business pain points. Can this platform make a difference in business pain points?

Second, core competence. What can this platform do?

Third, feasibility. How much will it cost? Are you ready to take potential risks?

Once you choose a specific line of business and platform, you need to move on to another three factors.

First, financial stability. financial stability is essential to the application of blockchain tech in financial areas. You need to put consensus mechanism and management system into consideration.

Second, engineered capacity. By engineered capacity, I mean whether this platform have been tested in scenarios. Does it adopt private or public cloud computing? Is there operations management and watchdog for regulation?

Third, security. This is of great importance in blockchain tech covering factors like certificate management, secret key algorithm and individual privacy.

What is Ant Financial ’s application of blockchain tech all about?

As an online payment company, we are looking for tech innovations that can make life better. Blockchain-based charity projects have gained more public recognition for making donation transparent.

By utilizing blockchain tech, we hope to bring more transparency to charity and blockchain technology’s decentralized nature fits that purpose well. Donors now can easily track down their transactions, the appropriation of funds and observe its flow.

Blockchain 2.0 has already become an open platform where charitable organizations are able to establish a self-regulation mechanism under close scrutinizing of media and partners.

In conclusion, I’d like to say that blockchain will change the world not for its tech, but for the spirit of transparency, openness and equality behind it. Only with such spirit can we change the entire ecosystem in a good way.