On Friday, Ant Group Digital Technologies unveiled a new brand, ZAN. It provides a suite of blockchain tools that helps institutions manage the tokenization of real world assets (RWA) in a compliant manner.
“Web3 is a technology sector bringing new opportunities as it cultivates more and more innovations. At Ant Group Digital Technologies, we have seen the trend and also efficiency and security related bottlenecks during the application development process,” said Zhang Hui, Chief Executive Officer of ZAN.
“To resolve these pain points, ZAN is dedicated to investing in research and development of Web3 technologies and products, providing more extensive and reliable technical services to support the community, and working with our partners to accelerate Web3 developments and innovations.”
The first client for the offering was HashKey DID, a decentralized identity solution that uses the ZAN eKYC offering. HashKey runs one of the first compliant digital asset exchanges in Hong Kong.
Ant Group says that it has already helped bring tens of millions of assets onto blockchains. We believe its blockchain technology powered low value e-commerce finance as well as the trade finance platform Trusple.
ZAN provides tools on top of tokenization
ZAN provides know your customer (KYC), anti money laundering (AML) and know your transactions (KYT) tools. Additionally, it offers smart contract review services as well as blockchain node services.
The latter sounds like an evolution of AntChain, the brand that is used for Ant’s proprietary blockchain as well as its blockchain-as-a-service solution.
For some time Ant Group has had big plans for AntChain outside of China. It was the official blockchain partner of the UEFA EURO 2020 football championship. AntChain has been working on confidential computing and privacy enhancing technologies (PET) such as multi party computation (MPC) and zero knowledge proofs (ZKP) for some time.
On Friday the group also announced its Financial Large Language Model (LLM) for artificial intelligence (AI) plus two related applications. These are an intelligent financial assistant, Zhixiaobao 2.0, which provides market analysis and asset allocation suggestions. And Zhixiaozhu 1.0, which is an intelligent business assistant that can help investment advisors and insurance claim specialists.
