The founder of ‘Meituan’, a Chinese Internet giant took a photo with Ethereum’ founder Vitalik in a blockchain summit held in Beijing, China. The photo prompts speculation that whether ‘Meituan’ wants to take on the blockchain world.

The two-day-long event also brought together leading China-based Internet leaders including ‘Dianping’ and ‘Meituan’, which are E-Commerce platforms offering local business search, group buying and other merchant services. It is notable that ‘Meituan’ beat Baidu ( a search engine giant in China) to put itself in the ranks of the top three in Chinese Internet area.

‘Meituan’ is the tiny minority who has not entered blockchain area among Internet giants in China. The photo undoubtedly prompts speculation that whether ‘Meituan’ wants to take on the blockchain world in China. Some netizens in China even pictured the blockchain layout of ‘Meituan’ in 2025.

Almost without exception, these Chinese Internet giants like Alibaba, Huawei, Tencent have focused on blockchain area. Alibaba’s Ant Financial has invested in QEDIT, a blockchain project. Tencent and Huawei-backed coinless consortium blockchain takes aim at hyperledger fabric. Many major high-tech players in China has launched their own Blockchain-as-a-Service (BaaS) solutions. In April, Huawei launched its blockchain service platform to enable companies and to develop smart contracts on top of a distributed ledger network for several use-case scenarios. So why does ‘Meituan’ as a Chinese Internet giant hasn’t entered blockchain area?

In essence, the user data mastered by ‘Meituan’ does not belong to itself, but belongs to the users which is the users’ privacy. Although China’ authority is not so sensitive to personal privacy data at present, people’s awareness of data privacy protection is rising in China.

In fact, Wang Xing, the founder of Meituan keeps close attention to blockchain all the time. After the birth of Facebook’s Libra, Wang published his personal comments on Libra as follows:

Meituan, the local information provider, specializes in the field of “eating”, which is currently the closest industry to the blockchain, while food traceability and logistics tracking are relatively well-developed industries in the area of blockchain. Maybe blockchain will allow Meituan to break turn overtaking competitors.