Jack Ma, the chairman of E-commerce giant Alibaba and China’s leading digital payments platform Ant Financial has demonstrated his interest in Bitcoin and blockchain technology as well as the potential of establishing a cashless society.

Although Ma used to hold a doubtful attitude towards Bitcoin and thought it is a bubble,he has changed his mind to a certain extent.

“Bitcoin, the thing I want to know is that what value, what things that Bitcoin can bring to the society. But behind Bitcoin, the technology itself, is really very powerful,” Ma said in a recent speech.

As the most influential entrepreneur in internet finance field, Ma concerned about building a cashless society. he disclosed that he is still working to learn the blockchain technology to see whether it could be the key to build a cashless society based on the sustainable and transparent transactions.

“I pay special attention to cashless society and blockchain technology. Mine and Alibaba’s job is we will move the world into a cashless society. The society can make everybody equal, inclusive to get the money they need, make sure it is sustainable and is transparent. I hate corruption. I don’t have opportunity is OK. But I don’t want somebody through a dirty way take away my opportunity. This is why we want a cashless society.”

China has the largest population in the world and only small portion of people are still using credit cards or cash in their daily life. Payment applications like Ant Financial’s Alipay dominate the payment space.

It was reported that, Alipay now has over 700 million annual active users. Ray Chan, the vice president of Ant Financial commented that majority of their users are millennials and the new generation as they always looking for cutting-edge technology. He commented:

“When we consider new products, we create them for this era, one in which young people have become the main driving force of our society.”

Nowadays, most enterprise-level financial networks require centralized databases to operate transactions. While blockchain technology may enables enterprises to manage their business on top of a decentralized computing system, like Ethereum, and cryptocurrency may be an essential part for these platforms.

As blockchain powered decentralized computing system being adopted by the mainstream, cryprocurrencies will have a broader application scenarios as well.