The Cyberspace Administration of China requires blockchain projects to register and “accept social supervision“ effective February 15th. On Saturday the government watchdog published a list of 197 registered projects which provides a glimpse into the breadth of China’s enterprise blockchain activities.
BATJ activities
China’s big tech companies have numerous blockchain initiatives on the list. The group are referred to as BAT in the West and BATJ in China and include China’s big search engine and AI company Baidu, Alibaba the B2C and B2B marketplace organization, Tencent the gaming and social network company, and online retailer JD.com.
All of the big four provide Blockchain as a Service (BaaS) cloud offerings. Both Baidu and Tencent have blockchain protocols that compete with the likes of Hyperledger Fabric.
In Baidu’s case, its BaaS service is called BBE and it’s protocol XuperChain. It additionally registered its copyright blockchain which is sometimes called Totem or Pic-Chain.
Tencent‘s cloud BaaS service, appropriately called TBaaS, currently supports the Chinese consortium blockchain FISCO BCOS, Hyperledger Fabric, and its own protocol TrustSQL. TBaaS has plans to support Ethereum and R3’s Corda in the future.
Surprisingly Alibaba’s only listed application was its BaaS offering. But it has invested in several others mentioned in the document.
JD.com has three blockchain projects. Its BaaS service, its blockchain data service and its anti-counterfeit traceability solution.
Other notable projects
We’ve previously written about Zheshang Bank which launched a trade finance blockchain in 2017 and issued a securitized loan note in 2018. But the list reveals several more initiatives including a warehouse receipt platform which fits in with the receivables financing initiative. Additionally, it has an OTC trading platform and a “personal finance product transfer platform”. We believe the latter enables investors in fixed-term wealth management products to be able to transfer them to gain early liquidity.
ZhongAn Technology is the wide-ranging technology subsidiary of digital insurance company ZhongAn. Not to be left out, it also has a BaaS service. Plus it registered its Titanium decentralized identity network as well as brand traceability and product line solutions.
PingAn Insurance has one subsidiary that registered a service for a digital prepaid card for a wallet. Its OneConnect technology subsidiary also has the high profile trade finance blockchain as well as the initiative with Tianjin port.
