The Team

The founder and CEO Wang Xiaoming is also the founder of Shanghai Zhaoxi Network Technology Co. an what is most interesting, co-founder of UnionPay Smart (we’ll come back to that later). He is also a early blockchain innovator which makes him a highly respected blockchain and crypto expert in China. He also wrote several publications on this topic and has spoken at multiple crypto/blockchain events all around the globe. He also has strong ties to NEO.

One of his co-founders is Li Jinxing, a research and blockchain expert was an analyst at Guotai Junan securities, which is one of the largest investment banks in China.

Besides those two HPB has 50+ employees coming from Huawei, Intel, Deloitte and several major Chinese companies working for HPB.

The Advisors & Investors

Among the advisors are Wan Zongru, who was part of a CERN-related experiment and research group which went on to win a Nobel prize, Long Kai who is the executive president of UnionPay Smart (again — I’ll come back to this later), Chen Zhen the president of the very successful Dongfang Fuhua Fund and a lot of other big names.

The Investors include NEO (that’s why HPB is the first one to use the NeoVM), TimeStamp Capital (Major Chinese investment), Lei Zhen (founder of OKcoin), OK Capital, BlockWater Capital, Bixin, 8BTC, Krypital Capital, Xianghe Capital, Jitan Capital, Supernode Capital, Continue Capital, Bitcoin World, Jike Xueyuan, Pchain, Block Origin and Guanghe Fund.

The Partners

The picture above one resembles a selected list of partners — in reality there are more: Add SharesChain, Pchain, etc.. The latest addition is the SME Finance Forum in International Finance Corporation (IFC) of the World Bank Group. The World Bank Group is one of the world’s largest sources of funding and knowledge for developing countries. Its aim is to reducing poverty, increase shared prosperity, and promote sustainable development.

The one partner I want to talk about in this article is UnionPay Smart:

UnionPay Smart is specialized in big data innovation business and a subsidary of UnionPay. UnionPay currently handles 80% of China’s banking transaction data, it has an annual turnover of 14,95 trillion US dollars. Union pay currently operates in 168 countries and regions, covering over 51 million merchants and 2.57 million ATMs. UnionPay is also supporting the upgrading of the payments industry along the “One Belt, One Road” initiative.

It will also be the company with which HPB will do it’s first project. The topcis of this project will be authorization, certification, and traceability of big data.

The tentative launch time for this project is Q3 2018. This is also one of the 3 use cases already defined in the HPB white paper.

The 3 currently listed use cases

Smart big data

In short this is about security, privacy and availability for big data which can’t be taken care of centralized IT systems which could deal with the efficiency needs but not with things like data leakage, lack of transparency, data incompleteness, etc.. A distributed Blockchain ecosystem which is able of fulfilling high performance needs — HPB — is needed for such a use case.

Anti-counterfeit traceability

That’s the classical use case of Blockchain — HPB comes into play when a large scale implementation is needed.

Gaming: Virtual currencies and items

Since HPB supports a stable million-level concurrency it can be widely used in the online gaming industry for providing decentralized virtual game currencies and securely transferring in-game products across different platforms and not only inside one games/publishers/organizations closed ecosystem.

Roadmap

The roadmap is quite ambitious thinking about HPB needs to develop both hard- and software. But by now they met their targets and only have a slight delay on their Mainnet launch (instead they had their BOE launch at the beginning of July which wasn’t even on their initial roadmap — so that’s a good excuse for me)