Tag: small business

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.”

Image via Shutterstock

How Small Businesses can use Blockchain?

If you keep tabs on the technological world then there is no way you could have overlooked blockchain. Just like any other revolutionary technology, blockchain is currently showing lots of promises and soon it will become one of the most impactful technological evolutions. This is one of the main reasons why the total blockchain investment reached around 3.08 million dollars and it will continue growing in the future as well.

If you are already aware about blockchain then you must be also aware of the fact how it has completely changed payments. There is no denial in the fact that blockchain started with payment but now it has become much more than just a tool for improving payments.

Here are some of the best ways small businesses can use blockchain without burning a hole in their pocket.

Proof of identity

You should know that blockchain contains many blocks of untamperable data and this is why it is considered an excellent tool for providing vital data. In the modern era, identity theft has become one of the biggest worries for most of the firms and people out there and blockchain is the best way to prevent it.

In a similar manner, blockchain can be used for verifying new business partners or it can also be used for checking the credentials of an employee and their work history. So, we can say that blockchain can be used as a protector and proof of identity.

Validating supply chain

If you are running a small business where you are already validating products with the help of blockchain then instead of limiting the applications of blockchain to product validation, you should start using it for the supply chain as well. This will allow you to easily track where the different parts of your products are coming from and it will also help you in showing your customer that your supply chain has no complications and it is completely clean.

There are many small firms out there that have already started using blockchain for validating their supply chain and they have been quite successful with their approach. In the modern era, customers will be really interested in buying a product from a company that uses a supply chain in which there is no involvement of child labor or there are no inhuman working conditions.

Protecting intellectual property

We are living in a digital era and this era might have given us many benefits but it has come along with many challenges as well. One such challenge that people have to face is regarding their intellectuals properly. In the digital era, protecting intellectual property has become quite challenging but you can overcome this challenge by using blockchain, especially if you are running a small-sized business.

You should know that you can use blockchain for keeping your intellectual property safe, regardless of how or where you publish it. But this is not it as even while selling the intellectual property to your customers, you can stay safe if you will start using blockchain.

Controlling advertising

With new products being launched virtually every second, it has become really difficult to make your ads stand out of the crowd, especially when the whole ad landscape has become crowded. And in such a crowded market, how can you make sure that your ads are hitting the right target? Well, you can do this by tracking traffic with the help of blockchain.

A consumer that will open your ad will create a blockchain record for you and this will allow you to check the different circumstances of your ad’s delivery. But you should also know that this will go both ways as when you will start using blockchain then you will also be allowing your customer to see how you are handling the data. This is why you will have to use it wisely and make it the star of your firm.

Blockchain is soon going to be one of the most revolutionary technologies out there but it will take some time for this technological miracle to mature and become a new normal for everyone out there. If you are running a small business then you should start looking for ways to harness the power of blockchain as soon as possible.

Author Bio

Kashyapi Prajapati has been involved in the world of accounting software, SEO and cloud computing from a very long time and currently, she is working as a lead content writer with Cloudwalks, a QuickBooks on the cloud hosting which offers affordable QuickBooks hosting pricing. Cloud computing and SEO is what she eats and drinks.

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