The cloud computing part of China’s largest online retailer Alibaba has announced that they have expanded their blockchain as a service (BaaS) beyond their domestic borders.

Alibaba’s statement disclosed that BaaS would be offered to major global markets including South East Asia, The U.S. and Europe. Alibaba Cloud’s blockchain service provides an enterprise-level platform service based on blockchain technologies and helps customers build a secure and stable environment for blockchain implementations.

Alibaba Cloud provides a comprehensive suite of cloud computing services to businesses worldwide, including merchants doing business on Alibaba Group marketplaces, start-ups, corporations and government organisations. Alibaba Cloud is the official Cloud Services Partner of the International Olympic Committee. Officially launched last year in October, some of the applications that the Blockchain as a Service offering of Alibaba supports include smart contracts, consortium blockchain management, automatic deployment and various Software Development Kit applications.

Alibaba Cloud’s BaaS supports enterprise-level blockchain applications on the two platforms of Hyperledger Fabric and Ant Blockchain. Hyperledger is a multi-project, multi-stakeholder effort that includes ten business blockchain and distributed ledger technologies (DLT). Hyperledger Fabric is a blockchain framework implementation and one of the Hyperledger projects hosted by The Linux Foundation. Ant Blockchain, developed by Alibaba Group’s financial affiliate Ant Financial Services Group, is proprietary and multi-patented high-performing blockchain platform. The security of BaaS is guarded by trusted computing and a secure consortium blockchain network. With this strong architecture, customers can create their own BaaS applications on Alibaba Cloud’s effective and reliable platform.

A few months ago, Ant Financial’s blockchain trials were successful. Jack Ma then explained that there are almost 2 billion people that are unbanked but most of them have a smartphone and access to the internet. The possibilities fro blockchain is limitless and may go far beyond our imagination.

Alibaba’s founder and the richest man in Asia, Jack Ma, has not always been a fan of Bitcoin, but blockchain is another ball game. At a conference, earlier this year, he explained that he was very bullish on blockchain but bitcoin, however, was in a bubble.

The company has been working very hard with innovation and not least blockchain innovation. A report showed that the Alibaba group has over 90 patent applications on distributed ledger technology which is more than the tech giant IBM.

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