Tag: alipay

Alipay Officially Bans All Bitcoin-Related Transactions

Alipay, one of the most popular digital payment systems under China’s Alibaba group, officially stated that it would be banning all payment transactions related to Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.

As mentioned in a twitter thread, “there’re several reports about @Alipay being used for bitcoin transactions. To reiterate, Alipay closely monitors over-the-counter transactions to identify irregular behavior and ensure compliance with relevant regulations.” 

Alipay reiterated, “if any transactions are identified as being related to bitcoin or other virtual currencies, @Alipay immediately stops the relevant payment services. 

Last year, Alipay already banned all over-the-counter (OTC) trading accounts related to Bitcoin.  

Binance began accepting payments via Alipay and WeChat  

Binance announced on Oct. 9 that it has started accepting fiat currencies through payment services Alipay and WeChat. 

However, Changpeng Zhao, CEO of Binance, clarified that Binance is not working with Alipay or WeChat directly. The service will begin to be made available for Android users registered with Binance for over 30 days, with support of iOS added subsequently.   

China’s development of its central bank digital currency   

The People’s Bank of China (PBoC), China’s state-owned bank, has been reportedly developing its own digital currency aimed to replace cash in circulation and was said to be ready in the coming months. However, reports have stated that the digital currency would not be running on a blockchain.   

Brad Garlinghouse, CEO of Ripple and angel investor Anthony Pompliano noted that China might gain leadership in the industry of central bank digital currencies amongst the other benefits that would follow. 

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WeChat Pay and Alipay May Have Helped China to Track Coronavirus Victims Through Digital Payments

With the novel coronavirus infecting more than 75,000 people around the world, and with the majority of the Chinese population in the Hubei province infected, authorities in the nation decided to track everyone who bought fever medicine in the province.  

Provincial officials have taken measures to grasp tighter measures to better control the outbreak, as the situation has not shown signs of slowing down. Officials reported that they have tracked offline and online purchases of fever medicine to be able to provide relief efforts, as fever is one of the symptoms most patients with the virus display.  

The officials also mentioned that comprehensive investigations have been conducted,on citizens who have reported fever symptoms at medical institutions, and those who have purchased medicine through physical pharmacies or online. Information including the time, date, name, citizenship number, address, phone number of the citizen has been recorded.  

China’s CBDC vs. Alipay & WeChat Pay  

Alipay and WeChat Pay, the country’s most used mobile payment systems, have been suggested to provide the information collected from the citizens. The Alipay ewallet, owned by Alibaba Holdings, and WeChat, owned by Tencent, has close ties to the Chinese government. Mobile payments in China reached over $41 trillion annually, with over 92 percent of mobile payments made via Alipay and WeChat Pay. 

China has been progressing with the development of its central bank digital currency (CBDC), its digital currency electronic payment (DCEP). It has been revealed that the digital payment system is to replace M0 supply, which are the notes and coins in circulation, and is aimed at the retail market.  

Mu Changchun, the Director-General of the Institute of Digital Currency of the People’s Bank of China previously made a comment that the DCEP would “provide redundancy” to China’s “advanced electronic payment platforms” including payment duopoly WeChat Pay and Alipay.  

However, confidential information of Chinese citizens making purchases online and in-person has been provided to the Chinese authorities, raising the question of the necessity of its CBDC from the perspective of financial monitoring.  

 

Alibaba Integrates New Blockchain System With its E-Commerce Platform to Enhance Traceability

Alibaba has recently announced its integration of a full-link traceability blockchain system into its import e-commerce platform, Kaola. The Chinese e-commerce giant has previously acquired NetEase’s Kaola cross-border e-commerce platform in September 2019 for $2 billion. 

Alibaba Group’s CEO previously said that the company is confident about the future of China’s import e-commerce market, “which we believe remains in its infancy with great growth potential.” 

A report by Sina Finance explained that the integration of blockchain technology provided by Ant Financial will enable online consumers to find out the information of the goods and its logistics information through scanning an Alipay QR code. 

Kaola will continue to utilize blockchain for platform merchants and overseas direct mail services, reaching over 60 countries and regions, with over 2,800 product types, including over 7,400 brands. 

Alibaba stated that with the addition of blockchain technology, the e-commerce giant hopes to address the industry’s traditional pain points including tracking, lost goods, and logistics information.

Ant Financial has already been supplying its technology to over 200 financial institutions. Cheaper remittances from Hong Kong to the Philippines have also been witnessed as a result of using Ant Financial’s blockchain. A rice traceability project has also been enabled by the institution’s blockchain technology. In an event in Hangzhou held in 2019, Ant Financial VP Geoff Jiang said that distributed ledger technologies have progressed faster than forecasted. In the next two years, the firm expects commercialization to accelerate significantly. 

Alipay, one of the most popular digital payment systems under China’s Alibaba group, officially stated that it has planned to ban all payment transactions related to Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. Last year, Alipay already banned all over-the-counter (OTC) trading accounts related to Bitcoin.

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Ant Financial Launches OpenChain for China's Small Businesses to Leverage its Enterprise Blockchain Consortium

Ant Financial, the parent company of AliPay, has launched OpenChain, a new blockchain platform that gives developers and small and micro enterprises (SMEs) the power to leverage the Chinese blockchain giant’s proprietary blockchain consortium and efficiently and cost effectively deploy smart contracts and create decentralized apps (DApps).

Ant Financial Blockchain is the largest productivity blockchain platform in China with the ability to process and support one billion user accounts and one billion transactions every day. It has topped the global ranking for blockchain patent applications for the past three consecutive years.

The main blockchain platform has already been extensively used in enterprise blockchain solutions for firms such as Bayer in agriculture and China Everbright Bank in supply chain finance.

Jin Ge, General Manager of Blockchain Platforms for Ant Financial said, “Applications of blockchain technology have ballooned over the past few years. Through the launch of the OpenChain platform, we aim to help one million SMEs and developers innovate and explore more use cases in the next three years,” in the announcement this morning.

OpenChain Features

The OpenChain offering provides developers with a variety of ready-to-go modules that can be used to build trust in multi-party collaboration. This is especially useful in area such as supply chain finance, product provenance, digital invoices and charitable donations.

As China drives its blockchain campaign and business are encouraged to assimilate the technology, the OpenChain platform could helps SMEs to greatly reduce development and deployment costs of the technology applications and allows them to focus on product and service delivery.

Open Chain Building Trust in China

Blockchain companies have become a hot property in China over the last year and the rise in company registrations has surged following Chinese Leader Xi Jinping’s announcement last October that the Middle Kingdom must strive to become the blockchain leader.

According to a report from China Finance, many larger businesses across China are blockchain companies in name only and in fact have little to do with the groundbreaking technology.

LongHash data reveals that of the 79,555 registered blockchain companies in China, only about 26,000 are operating and 57,000 have lost their license and legal status.

In the first quarter of 2020, as the Coronavirus disruption began to shut down factories, offices and cities in China, a further 2,383 brand-new blockchain companies emerged.

OpenChain could be a potential solution to the frenzy for small businesses as its main purpose is to build trust in commercial and transactional usecases, the success of which may depend on multiple party collaboration.

According to the release, “These use cases require not only a trust mechanism among all parties, but also high-performance consensus algorithms that can complete authentication computation on the fly. Ant Financial’s OpenChain also uses trusted computing capabilities to enhance data security and protection for the apps running on its platform.”

WhiteMatrix, a provider enterprise blockchain app development services, has been using OpenChain to develop smart contracts for developers since 2019 when it began its alpha tests.

Wu Xiao, the founder and CEO of WhiteMatrix said of OpenChain, “The platform offers efficient blockchain development services, facilitates cost-effective smart contracts, and lowers the entry barrier for developers. Not only are OpenChain’s transaction speeds several times faster than public blockchain platforms like Ethereum, but the cost per transaction is only one tenth of others.”

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Binance Accused by Chinese State Media of Operating Cryptocurrency Exchange in China

Chinese state media has reported that Binance is still supporting local users trading cryptocurrency, despite China banning all exchanges in 2017.

According to a report by Chinese state media CCTV, a journalist in Beijing was able to create an account on Binance’s Chinese platform (binancezh.com) and immediately have access to Bitcoin and cryptocurrency trade.

The journalist reports that they were able to easily register for an “individual” account on the website, upload all their identity documents and complete the facial recognition verification via Binance’s mobile app, with no difficulty.

The report states that the journalist then went on to purchase some Bitcoin on Binance’s peer-to-peer (P2P) platform without any issue, exchanging fiat currency with a counterparty. They then received an official notification from Binance that the transaction was completed.

Binance responded to CCTV and claims that its app cannot currently be downloaded in China and its website is inaccessible. A Binance spokesman also said that binancezh.com is just a test site and is mainly accessed by users from Egypt.

China and Cryptocurrency Exchanges

In 2017, China officially banned all cryptocurrency exchange activities within its borders. The ban, which was announced in September 2017 made it illegal for Chinese mainlanders to exchange digital money unless they operated offshore.

Which is precisely where they went. Huobi stopped all bitcoin trading in mainland China and have moved to Singapore, Hong Kong, and South Korea – they now operate globally. Shanghai-based BTCC also stopped trading and Binance moved Taiwan.

However, Chinese citizens can still buy crypto via peer-to-peer (P2P) platforms or over-the-counter (OTC) trading desks,. Last October, Binance also launched its P2P platform in China, enabling users to buy crypto via Alipay and WeChat. Alipay, however, later that said it doesn’t support crypto transactions.

Chinese Banks Clarify on Crypto Account Freezing Despite Alipay’s Crypto Ban Last Year

China’s banks were rumored to be freezing client accounts that have a history associated with the buying and selling of cryptocurrencies. 

However, according to a recent report, Chinese banks have clarified that this is not the case, and they are not shutting down any legal fiat to crypto accounts.

China Merchants Bank, Bank of China, Agricultural Bank of China, has responded with, “As long as the operation is legal, the channel is legal, the virtual currency source is legal, the page supports bank card service, no user’s funds will be voluntarily frozen unless it involves illegally related cases such as money laundering and fraud.”

In October 2019, Alipay’s Security Center wrote on Weibo saying, “As long as there is an Alipay payment page, and it must be operated legally, there will be no freezing of funds.”

However, Alipay explicitly mentioned that the payment platform completely banned all payment transactions related to Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. 

As mentioned in a Twitter thread, Alipay tweeted, “if any transactions are identified as being related to bitcoin or other virtual currencies, @Alipay immediately stops the relevant payment services.”

Binance and crypto exchanges in China

Binance also announced around the same time last year that the exchange has started accepting fiat currencies through payment services, Alipay and WeChat. 

According to CCTV, a Chinese state media, Binance has been allowing local users to trade cryptocurrency, despite the ban of digital currencies in the country since 2017.

A journalist in Beijing was able to create an account on Binance’s Chinese platform (binancezh.com) and immediately have access to Bitcoin and cryptocurrency trade. The journalist was able to create an account and verify with all the identity documents given on Binance’s mobile app with no difficulty.

Binance later responded with a claim that its app is not accessible in China and that the site was only used for testing. 

Anti-money laundering and defrauding

The Chinese central bank has announced a new fine related to anti-money laundering laws during Q1 this year, stepping up on anti-money laundering efforts. Anti-money laundering efforts in the changing times of new currencies may be a challenge with new emerging technologies. 

In the Southern District of New York, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission announced that the US District Court entered a consent order for a permanent injunction against a man of soliciting 13 individuals to trade off-exchange foreign currency derivatives (forex). 

The CFTC emphasized that the orders requiring repayment of funds to victims may not always result in the recovery of all of the money lost as the defendants may not have sufficient funds or assets. The CFTC is continuing its efforts in protecting customers and holding wrongdoers accountable. 

Alibaba’s Plan to Digitize the Services Industry to Rival Tencent Involves Blockchain

Alibaba subsidiary Ant Group CEO Simon Hu is accelerating Alipay’s progression into an online mall for commerce, food, travel services to rival Tencent Holdings Ltd.

Ant Group Chief Executive Simon Hu has been in discussions regarding digital payment and cloud offerings with KFC and Marriott International, aiming to diversify its focus from traditional banks and fund managers. The change in focus has also marked its transformation from its registered name from Ant Financial Services Group to Ant Group Co., at the end of May. Alibaba Group owns a 33 percent stake in Ant Group. 

Hu has been looking to digitize the services industry, as he mentioned in an interview when he took on the CEO role. He said, “We’ve been pursuing the strategy to evolve Ant into a tech company, with an open-platform strategy for many years.”

CEO Simon Hu wants the public to think of Alipay, owned by Ant Group as the go-to app for a wide range of needs, from the retail market to wealth management, and for e-commerce purposes, while moving away from the idea as a niche provider of financial services. 

Hu is also looking to incorporate and promote emerging technologies including artificial intelligence and blockchain to the businesses that wish to use the platform. In five years, the CEO is aiming for 80 percent of Ant Group’s revenue to come from local merchants and finance firms, up from around 50 percent at the end of 2019. He said:

“We want to share the technology and resources we’ve developed as an online financial platform with more companies in finance, local services, public services, and other countries. The shift doesn’t hinder any initial public offering plans and the company is still open to listing.”

Late to mini programs

Since three years ago, Tencent has already been dominating the mini programs space, which Alipay has been “late to.”

Owned by Tencent, social messaging platform WeChat has over 400 million users a day on the platform renting bicycles, ordering food, and renting apartments through the app, which grew Tencent’s share of mobile payments and ad revenue. 

In an attempt to rival Tencent, Alipay’s Hu has been aiming to over natural advantages, such as the personalization of its interface, allowing users to pin frequently used services. Alipay also plans to use algorithms to further customize its landing page for its current 600 million monthly users, with 2 million mini programs after two years. 

Alibaba and blockchain technology

Alibaba has integrated a full-link traceability blockchain system into its import e-commerce platform, Kaola. The Chinese e-commerce giant has previously acquired NetEase’s Kaola cross-border e-commerce platform in September 2019 for $2 billion.

Alibaba stated that with the addition of blockchain technology, the e-commerce giant hopes to address the industry’s traditional pain points including tracking, lost goods, and logistics information.

China to Test its CBDC on Tencent-Backed Platform and Other Domestic Firms to Break Dependence on the US

China’s central bank has taken another major step forward toward the digital yuan’s mass adoption with its testing on food delivery giant Meituan Dianping. Backed by Tencent, Meituan has been having discussions with the People’s Bank of China’s (PBoC) central bank digital currency (CBDC), also known as digital currency electronic payment (DCEP) research wing. 

According to Bloomberg, the details of the partnership are yet to be finalized. Another Tencent-backed company, Bilibili — a site that streams videos, is also in discussions with the central bank on the digital yuan trials. 

Both Meituan Dianping and Bilibili are currently using payment systems, including Alipay and WeChat pay, backed by Alibaba Group and Tencent. The world’s second-largest economy has a $27 trillion payments industry, and with the testing of the DCEP — could potentially shift China’s dependence on the US. 

As reported by Blockchain.News, earlier this month, China’s Central Bank Digital Currency Research Institute and Chinese transportation platform Didi Chuxing have reached an agreement to explore and develop the use of digital yuan in the transportation industry.

Didi Chuxing announced that the company would be working with the Chinese Digital Currency Research Institute to implement guidelines proposed by the central party government to improve financial services in the economy and integrate the digital economy into the current economy.

China’s digital yuan, as explained by the Director-General of the Institute of Digital Currency at the central bank, is a two-tiered system that will soon be replacing M0, Chinese yuan fiat in circulation.

The DCEP has already been in experimentation in the real world, with the Suzhou municipal government employees receiving 50 percent of their transportation subsidies in May 2020 in DCEP. 

The PBoC previously partnered with seven state-owned institutions to roll out the pilot test of the DCEP. The pilot program aimed to concentrate first on industries including transportation, education, commerce, and healthcare. The pilot program in Shenzhen was aimed to be carried out in two phases, including a small-scale testing period, before the DCEP would be widely promoted in the city this year.

Xiao Gang, the former chairman of the China Securities Regulatory Commission stressed the importance of developing the digital economy in the country. Speaking at the 19th Pushan Lectures of China Finance 40 Forum, Xiao emphasized the urgency for a digital reform, saying that the boundaries of some products and services in the digital capital market are becoming blurred, and the current laws and regulations around digital currencies would not suffice. 

Xiao suggested that more research into decentralization and information needs to be done and that the country would need to embrace new technologies and build business models to promote data connectivity.

Alibaba’s Ant Group Set to be 2020’s Top IPOs in Hong Kong and Shanghai

Ant Group, formerly known as Ant Financial has announced its intentions of launching an initial public offering (IPO) that would be featured both on the Shanghai Stock Exchange’s STAR board and the Stock Exchange of Hong Kong (HKEX/ SEHK).  

The Inner Scoop on Ant Group’s IPO

The STAR board focuses predominantly on technology companies and hopes to rival Nasdaq. A senior executive of Ant Group disclosed anonymously that the fintech company had been holding off the announcement of the listing, due to its goal of “securing the full support of Beijing.”  

Another Ant executive suggested that the IPO was still in its early processes of development, which may explain why Ant Financial has not yet provided a fixed date for its listing or publicly announced how much money it was hoping to raise. In any case, the technology company is so predominant in the fintech industry that even a listing of a tiny portion of its shares would equate to one of the biggest IPOs of any given company. 

By dually listing the IPO on both HKEX and the Shanghai Stock Exchange, Ant hopes this will broaden the horizons of the fintech firm globally.  Executive Chairman of Ant Group,  Eric Jing, commented on the IPO listing: 

“The innovative measures implemented by SSE STAR market and the SEHK have opened the doors for global investors to access leading edge technology companies from the most dynamic economies in the world and for those companies to have greater access to the capital markets. We are thrilled to have the opportunity to play a part in this development.”

Though Ant Group wishes to extend its network throughout China, there is no mention of its IPO being listed on the US stock exchange, contrary to Alibaba, its affiliate company that was listed on the New York Stock Exchange and that is a major shareholder of Alipay. 

While there is still much speculation revolving around the official launch date of the IPO, many fintech experts predict that the IPO will be one of the biggest ones of 2020. According to a Reuters report, Ant Group is expected to generate approximately $200 billion in market capitalization.  

Ant Group — A Force to Be Reckoned With in the FinTech Industry

The fintech company aspires to branch out from the finance industry and focus solely on dominating the technology sector. Nevertheless, the Alibaba affiliate has a lot of bargaining power in China’s financial sector, as there are more than 600 million users that deposit funds into its Yu’E Bao, Ant Group’s money market fund. 

Ant Group, founded by multibillionaire and business mogul Jack Ma, is also known as the parent company of Alipay, the top Chinese mobile payment company. Alipay rivals WeChat Pay and has approximately 1.2 billion users – this combines Chinese Alipay subscribers as well as overseas affiliates. 

Ant Group Expands Blockchain Ecosystem

Among its many fintech projects, Ant Group’s ambitions of expanding go beyond just the traditional financial industry. Earlier this year, in April, it announced the launch of its proprietary blockchain platform in China – OpenChain. OpenChain is a relatively new blockchain network that equips software developers and small businesses with the proper tools to leverage the Chinese blockchain giant’s proprietary blockchain consortium – Ant Financial Blockchain. OpenChain also provides efficient and cost-effective solutions for the development of smart contracts and decentralized apps (DApps). 

Ant Group Partners with Dell, Hewlett-Packard and Lenovo to Enable Access for its New Blockchain Solution—AntChain

Ant Group, formerly known as Ant Financial, the payments arm of Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba, has launched a new blockchain solution, AntChain.

Ant Group has signed an agreement with Dell, Hewlett-Packard, and Lenovo to enable accessibility of IT leasing services for small to medium enterprises (SMEs) through the AntChain blockchain solution. 

The launch of AntChain aims to strengthen transparency and to build trust in industries involving a large number of participants and involves long and inefficient processes, such as supply chain. The executive chairman of Ant Group said: 

“Since our inception, building trust has been core to our offer to customers. We believe in blockchain’s potential to redefine trust in the digital age, and in solving real-life problems for our customers.”

The AntChain blockchain solution leverages emerging technologies including artificial intelligence and the internet of things (IoT). The new blockchain solution has been used in more than 50 use cases so far, in IT leasing, shipping, insurance claim processing, cross-border remittances, and even donations, according to the company.

Ant Group has been exploring the use of blockchain for its commercial applications since 2015, and has now reached the milestone where it has the capability to process and support one billion user accounts and transactions every day.

According to Ant Group, there are over 100 million digital transaction records, copyright certificates, property ownership certificates, and digital assets uploaded onto AntChain every day. 

Ant Group’s OpenChain blockchain platform

Ant Group launched OpenChain in April 2020, a new blockchain platform that gives developers and SMEs the power to leverage the Chinese giant’s proprietary blockchain consortium and efficiently and cost-effectively deploy smart contracts and create decentralized apps (DApps).

The main blockchain platform has already been extensively used in enterprise blockchain solutions for firms such as Bayer in agriculture and China Everbright Bank in supply chain finance.

Ant Group set to top Hong Kong and Shanghai’s IPO market in 2020

Ant Group has announced earlier this week its intentions of launching an initial public offering (IPO) that would be featured both on the Shanghai Stock Exchange’s STAR board and the Stock Exchange of Hong Kong.

By dually listing the IPO on both HKEX and the Shanghai Stock Exchange, Ant hopes this will broaden the horizons of the fintech firm globally. Jing, commented on the IPO listing saying, “The innovative measures implemented by the SSE STAR market and the SEHK have opened the doors for global investors to access cutting edge technology companies from the most dynamic economies in the world and for those companies to have greater access to the capital markets. We are thrilled to have the opportunity to play a part in this development.”

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