This week, Chinese media outlets reported that JD.com’s blockchain traceability solution accumulated 1.3 billion pieces of uploaded data. JRJ further claims that it has been used by over 700 brands and managed 60,000 products. JD’s technology is also used for asset-backed securities (ABS) with CITIC bank.
The traceability solution is known as Zhiyi, or Zhizhi, and runs on the underlying JD Chain, which is now open source. It also underlies JD’s blockchain as a service (BaaS) platform for enterprise, launched in August 2018.
With 300 million monthly users, JD.com is China’s second largest retailer after Alibaba’s Tmall.
Supply Chain
When the firm established a blockchain lab with universities a year ago, it said that its internal blockchain solution tracked 11,000 product SKUs of over 400 brands. This spring, JD.com shared an increase to 50,000 products and 700 brands. Now, that stands at 60,000 SKUs and 6 million after-sale queries.
The Zhiyi supply chain solution is mainly for anti-counterfeiting, which is unsurprising, given JD.com’s role as China’s biggest retailer with over 300 million customers. It allows enterprises to track products across the whole retail process, so brands can safeguard against fakes and monitor safety. It’s particularly useful in the case of a recall since the item’s source can be tracked to a specific batch.
But supply chain is just on of the major applications running on JD Chain.
Asset backed securities
JD.com claims that its ABS standardization solution is the first of its kind. Launched in June and based on the JD Chain blockchain, it was first used by firms including CITIC Securities, Zhonghua Accountants, and China Credit Rating.
With blockchain, ABS can be issued and traded more efficiently. Securitizing trade finance debts allows banks to offload some of their lendnig to investors, so they can continue lending beyond their determined limits. A similar Dubai project estimated the addressable size of this secondary market at $1 trillion.
The ABS solution has since won an award at the China International Intelligent Industry Expo and was given as a case study in a Forrester blockchain report. Last year, a China-based accounts receivable blockchain issued an asset-backed loan note. But JD.com sees its ABS project as more of a ‘program’, and hence the first like it in China.
Future of JD.com
“The direction of JD’s research and development of independent controllable blockchain technology will not change,” said Jing Xinlei, head of blockchain at the firm. He clarified that it will continue to focus on digital finance and supply chain management.
As a leader in the industry, JD.com will “promote industry standards in the field of blockchain, focus on the improvement of industrial efficiency, stimulate new formats and new models, and help the scale of the digital economy continue to expand,” summarized Jing.
