Early Bitcoin fanatics regarded this cryptocurrency as a symbol of subversion of the traditional capitalist order, but soon banks and other traditional financial institutions and large companies began to fight back. Today, most of the business people who participate in the blockchain technology (Bitcoin's underlying technology) conferences are in the majority, and the geeks are gradually fading away.
After eliminating the concerns of fraud and gray transactions, big companies are now seeing blockchain opportunities and want to use it to improve the efficiency of existing financial systems, or to find applications in new scenarios. The latest examples are UBS, Banco Santander, Deutsche Bank and Bank of New York Mellon, together with British brokerage ICAP and technology developer Clearmatics Technologies, together announced the development of a "utility settlement coin". A new digital currency. Other banks are also developing digital currencies such as Citicoin at Citigroup and SETLcoin at Goldman Sachs.
In addition, major foreign companies have also established the R3 CEV blockchain alliance. There are now 42 major financial institutions other than China, and companies such as Microsoft, Amazon, and IBM have also participated. The most likely change in R3 blockchain technology will be international payment and liquidation, but the main goal is to formulate industry standards for the development of banking blockchain technology and look for application scenarios.
Of course, large domestic companies are not far behind. Since the first half of this year, they have begun to deploy blockchain technology.
China Ledger Alliance
In April this year, China established the first blockchain alliance: the China Ledger Alliance for Distributed General Ledger Fundamentals (China Ledger Alliance), which includes 11 institutions including LeTV and Universal Blockchain Lab.
Letv Finance itself has also set up a blockchain lab and is currently focusing on commercial coin applications. However, according to Leroy Financial CEO Wang Yongli, there will not be too much basic research and development involved.
The main direction of the alliance is the distributed general ledger system and its derivative technologies. The basic code is open source and shared. However, as the former chief engineer of the Shanghai Stock Exchange, Bai Shuo said, "we cannot rush to link with the international blockchain organization and we cannot make every effort to understand how the blockchain has landed in China's financial sector. Each financial institution has been fighting for a single battle." So the scope of the alliance is not as extensive as the R3.
Shenzhen Blockchain Alliance
In May of this year, following the Ledger Alliance, Tencent's Weizhong Bank jointly established a “Shenzhen Financial Blockchain Cooperation Alliance†with 25 organizations including Ping An Bank, China Merchants Online Banking and Jingdong Finance. Its research plan includes research on the underlying technology of the blockchain, blockchain cloud services, and blockchain financing products.
MicronBank will also cooperate with leading institutions of financial science and technology to establish a blockchain research base for the financial industry. The goal is to launch blockchain finance and pan-finance applications.
At present, this blockchain alliance has not mentioned specific implementation scenarios externally, but the focus is undoubtedly financial.
Ant gold suit
In the application of blockchain, Ant Financial takes a step ahead. Earlier this month, Cheng Li, chief tech officer of Ant Financial, said that Ant Financial tried the blockchain application in public welfare scenarios. They cooperated with China Social Assistance Foundation to “listen on the Alipay Charity Donation Platform for online blockchain charity fundraising projectsâ€. The disabled children regained their new voice. Each payment will be recorded on the blockchain. There will be no manual payment, and it is difficult to make manual changes.
For a heavy payment system such as Alipay, the current blockchain technology cannot meet the demand (generally, the blockchain can handle only about 7 transactions per second), but Cheng Li, the ant Financial Services Group’s CTO, believes that “its real The value lies in using a distributed technology and a consensus algorithm to implement a trust mechanism." This is why the public charity scene was tested.
Ping An Group
Ping An’s focus on the blockchain is a special one. In April of this year, he joined R3, the Blockchain International Alliance.
Ping De Group's innovation executive Tu De once said that the blockchain has always been a focus area, and “is ready to set up a financial science and technology department to help blockchain development, or investment or interactionâ€.
Tu De believes that the company's dozens of companies involved in the financial, medical, health and other fields, the use of blockchain technology is very important. "U.S. stocks and global stocks use blockchain technology, which can save $2 billion and $6 billion, respectively, and therefore studied blockchain technology three years ago."
Baidu
Currently, Baidu's focus on blockchains is shown in the form of investment. In June of this year, it invested in blockchain payment APP Circle, laying out the blockchain.
Circle is an early leader in blockchain research and development in the online payment field. It enables users to transfer funds to APPs using debit or credit cards, and can also convert funds into Bitcoin. According to practitioners, Circle can be understood as a bank that uses Bitcoin as the settlement object. It will exchange with local exchanges, and these exchanges can also conduct transactions in the local currency. Circle's entire payment application is also based on the blockchain.
New Internet Protocol
As can be seen from the above, the domestic focus on the blockchain has lagged behind in terms of impact and overall progress, and more preparations have been made. In addition to ant gold suits, there are few programs available.
On the other hand, the four banks mentioned above have already begun to solve the problem of financial efficiency. According to Lei Feng Network (search "Lei Feng Network" public concern) understand that its multi-functional settlement currency is such a system, it will use blockchain technology to manufacture Different currencies, each currency can be directly converted to the existing currency. In essence, it is a way to put dollars, euros, and English into the blockchain. This multi-purpose settlement currency uses the characteristics of the blockchain, and the new currency is stored in the computer network. Before a transaction is recorded in the "chain", it needs to be clearly identified by all computer certificates. The transaction record will exist on the general ledger and all users in the network will be able to see it. This eliminates the need for centralized authorization.
Replacing the settlement system with a distributed general ledger can speed up the settlement and clearing of financial markets, allowing institutions to pay for securities (such as bonds and stocks) without having to wait for traditional transfers to be completed. The bank can also trim off the logistics department because the transaction records can be completed automatically. Of course, the entire system will be used as early as 2018.
However, even if blockchain technology does not have a real value in the short term, large companies will deploy it. One figure is that according to a report released by Santander in collaboration with other institutions, blockchain technology is used for payments, and securities transactions and regulatory compliance will save $150-200 billion annually by 2022.
But more importantly, blockchains have the potential to define Internet standards. An industry source told Lei Feng Network that it was a bit like a technical standard, and large companies had to be laid out; otherwise, once foreign countries matured, they could not keep up. Blockchain can be analogized to the Internet's TCP/IP protocol. Just as the Internet first appeared, many companies wanted to use their own local Internet as a common standard.
Perhaps the more intuitive the following figure is, the importance of visualizing blockchain technology:
This map was produced by Pantera Capital. It describes Bitcoin as the missing part of the Internet puzzle. It is also equivalent to the well-known HTTP, DNS and other protocols. Agreements and standards are inevitable and necessary. They are the value of the Internet.
As the technology evolves, we will see more blockchain technologies emerge. Everyone wants to dominate the world, but each has no absolute advantage. Independent development can't bring about economies of scale . Then each family will be unified to a common standard, or will there be several incompatible technologies?