Alibaba Financial Cloud may provide a blockchain-based cloud service platform

The 2016 Yunqi Conference Shanghai Summit was held at the Shanghai Science and Technology Museum. It is worth mentioning that a member of the Alibaba Financial Division revealed a piece of news at the conference that the company may provide a cloud service platform based on blockchain technology. The following content is transferred from the WeChat official account of Alibaba Financial Cloud.

The tide of Internet finance is changing the existing financial industry worldwide, but this change may not stop at the launch of direct banks, Internet insurance, Internet brokerages and other platforms. The cutting-edge blockchain technology in the industry provides an optional direction for the next upgrade of the financial industry. Its entrepreneurs are trying to use this financial technology to reconstruct infrastructure such as the credit formation mechanism, thereby more profoundly influencing and changing the financial transaction process.

Let’s first look at the development of the blockchain industry. In 2014, there were only three companies in the world engaged in blockchain-related businesses. In 2015, dozens of international financial giants emerged and began to deploy blockchain technology.

Since blockchain technology is still in its incubation stage, a consensus on its definition has not yet been formed. As for what exactly is blockchain technology? One view accepted by most industry insiders is that blockchain is a public ledger that uses computer programs to record all transaction information on the entire network. Its characteristics are decentralized storage, highly transparent information, and not easy to tamper with.

For the general public, what is more familiar is one of the applications of blockchain technology - virtual currencies such as Bitcoin. Bitcoin is stored on the blockchain. If Bitcoin is money, then this money is actually produced, stored and traded on the blockchain.

Currently, many financial institutions have laid out their plans in this field by establishing blockchain laboratories and investing in related technology companies. They include Nasdaq, JPMorgan Chase, Citibank, UBS, Goldman Sachs, Santander Bank, Barclays Bank, Deloitte, etc. The application experiments of blockchain technology have been launched in the securities, banking, auditing and other industries. The application directions include payment settlement, smart bonds, financial auditing, etc.

Since transactions on the blockchain cannot be deleted, revoked or modified once they are recorded, financial activities change from exchanging data to exchanging codes.

Blockchain technology can also establish a smart contract mechanism on the Internet, replacing contracts with programs. Once the agreed date and conditions are met, the network automatically executes the contract.

Since the currency and economy can be programmed, and there is an irrefutable database maintained by everyone on the blockchain, then if everyone opens their minds, can we also create a programmable society? It seems possible.

Although many people believe that blockchain technology is still in its early stages, everyone is actively exploring this technology that has a profound impact on the financial industry. We are currently working with one of the largest blockchain communities in China, Ethereum, to jointly recommend a public financial cloud based on blockchain, which does not require any servers to be set up, making it convenient for smart contracts and other programs to run on it. There are many beautiful imaginations in the application scenarios of blockchain, and perhaps the mutual insurance and crowdfunding industries are most likely to use blockchain technology to produce practical applications .