On June 1, Tencent Cloud announced it is establishing an ‘Industrial Blockchain Alliance’, a Securities Times report said. Tencent plans to recruit 100 members, including enterprises, industry associations, investment firms, universities, and think tanks.
Tencent, the owner of WeChat, is among the top blockchain players in China and has also registered numerous blockchain patents.
The new consortium will explore blockchain standards, core technology development, and potential applications. To meet these targets, it will form a standards committee, a technical committee, and a business ecosystem committee.
The standards committee will cooperate with government organizations and other alliance members for national and industry-specific standards.
The technical committee aims to help members to create joint industrial blockchain solutions. The platform would use Tencent Cloud services. One of the aims is knowledge transfer, so it will include think tank experts, technology executives as well as university researchers.
Lastly, the business ecosystem committee will work with investment firms, government agencies, and financial institutions to drive blockchain adoption in their processes.
“Blockchain is still in the early stage of industrial application. I look forward to taking the opportunity of the Industrial Blockchain Alliance to promote the discussion of industry norms and lay a solid foundation for the healthy development of the blockchain industry,” said Tang Daosheng, senior executive vice president of Tencent.
Beijing Zhulong Information Technology is joining as one of the first batch of members of the Blockchain Alliance. The company previously worked with Tencent Cloud on a bidding and trading platform using Tencent’s blockchain-as-a-service platform TBaaS.
The TBaaS platform supports Chinese blockchain FISCO BCOS (where Tencent is one of the participants) as well as Hyperledger Fabric and its own protocol, TrustSQL.
Last month, Tencent Holdings said it would invest 500 billion yuan ($70 billion) over the next five years in a wide range of technologies, including blockchain.
Tencent has previously used blockchain for supply chain finance and invoicing, among other things. It is also a member of a national blockchain group in China along with Huawei, Baidu, Ant Financial and JD.com.
In April, Tencent launched a blockchain accelerator and is incubating 30 firms in the first batch.
