After releasing the white paper for two consecutive years, Jingdong tried to regain a game through the blockchain.

Enterprises represented by listed companies have invested in exploring the blockchain. Some companies have clear application scenarios and certain R&D capabilities, and to some extent show the attitude of policies to the blockchain. Therefore, the application of the blockchain by listed companies is also an important perspective to observe the industry trends. Although there are no speculators who speculate on stock prices, there are many practical players.

To this end, the chain catcher launched a series of special reports on the listed companies, explored the lively practical experience of these companies, and observed the development path and situation of the blockchain in the real society from the perspective of listed companies. The fourth company on this topic is Jingdong.

Recently, Jingdong released the "Jingdong Blockchain Technology Practice White Paper (2019)", and once again puts Jingdong's strategic layout in the blockchain field in the public eye. Through this white paper and related news materials, we can see that Jingdong has placed the blockchain in a fairly high strategic position and applied it in its own existing business. This article will start from the background of the blockchain of Jingdong layout, trying to analyze the specific direction and landing situation of the blockchain strategy in Jingdong District.

01

Jingdong layout blockchain background

Founded in 1998, Jingdong is mainly engaged in the sales of electronic products under the line. In 2004, it launched the Jingdong Multimedia Network and officially transformed its e-commerce website. With the good experience of self-built logistics and the good quality of 3C and other products, JD.com has continued to lose more than 10 years, but it still wins a lot of investors' optimism and users' favor, and becomes the second e-commerce website with the market value in China.

However, in the near future, with the rise and impact of social e-commerce and other e-commerce businesses, as well as Taobao, Tmall and other e-commerce companies continue to optimize logistics, quality and other service experience, Jingdong's long-term stable "e-commerce second" position has been greatly shaken. According to its latest financial report, Jingdong's GMW growth rate and active user growth rate are continuing to slow down.

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In the near future, JD.com not only faces the negative impact of the deterioration of the macroeconomic environment on sales, but also the nearly ridiculous ridicule and accusation of a series of negative news such as layoffs and cancellation of the courier's basic salary.

More realistic is the issue of profitability. Due to the low profit margin of Jingdong's main category 3C products, and the difficulty in the expansion of apparel and other horizontal categories, Jingdong achieved a single quarter profit in 17-18, but the latest quarter fell again, showing Jingdong The e-commerce retail level has already faced a large bottleneck, which restricts the further development of JD.

In addition, Jingdong's emerging technology industries such as cloud computing and AI have not been timely deployed. In many emerging fields, they have fallen far behind competitors such as Ali, making JD. at a disadvantage in the long-term competition.

In response to this situation, Jingdong has proposed to transform from an e-commerce company to a retail technology company in the past few years, and has identified retail, logistics and digital technology as the "troika" that Jingdong goes hand in hand. The first two are not mentioned here. Digital technology refers to JD's systematic and standardized export of its technical capabilities accumulated over the years to help the industrial upgrading of all walks of life.

According to Jingdong's latest financial report, Jingdong's technology investment in 2018 reached 12.1 billion yuan, and the proportion of R&D investment in total cost in recent quarters is getting higher and higher. The year-on-year growth rate is over 70% in the four quarters of the year. It directly affects the overall profit performance of JD. But from the side, it can also see JD's determination and will to transform technology companies.

Since 16 years, blockchain technology has gradually entered the high-level view of Jingdong. Due to the blockchain technology in the Jingdong supply chain system, financial asset business and other scenarios have a certain degree of integration, and can optimize the structure and quality of the aforementioned business. Jingdong has been increasing its investment and practice in blockchain technology in the past few years.

At present, the blockchain has become one of the important technologies of Jingdong Digital Science. Cao Peng, vice president of Jingdong Digital Technology, pointed out that blockchain technology has become the fourth core technology capability of Jingdong Digital Technology after data technology, artificial intelligence and IoT.

02

Strategic Direction and Progress of Jingdong Layout Blockchain

According to the white paper and related materials released by JD.com, JD.com's current blockchain business is based on the JD Chain chain, which was released in August 18th. The architecture of the chain is divided into JD Chain and JD BaaS, of which JD As the core engine, Chain focuses on solving the key technical issues at the bottom of the blockchain. JD BaaS is an enterprise-class service platform that provides flexible, easy-to-use and scalable blockchain system management capabilities to third parties.

Specifically, JD Chain is designed for enterprise common business scenarios. Its design principles include business-oriented, building customization, security auditability, simplicity and efficiency, and standardization to achieve an efficient and flexible universal blockchain framework system. Blockchain technology uses thresholds and costs for third-party companies.

JD Chain Architecture

The functional modules of JD Chain are divided into four parts: gateway service, consensus service, data book and toolkit. The gateway service is the access layer of the application, providing functions such as terminal access, private key escrow, security privacy and protocol conversion; It is the core implementation layer of JD Chain, including the functions of consensus network, identity management, security authority, smart contract and data retrieval to ensure the consistency of the book information between nodes; the data book includes block, account, configuration and storage, etc. The block contains data snapshot hashes of transaction information and execution status, but does not store specific transaction operations and status data.

The node of JD Chain has client node, gateway node and consensus node. Only the latter will participate in the consensus and generate the consistent account book. The gateway node is used to connect the client and the consensus node, and the client node is through the JD chain. The SDK performs the upper application of the blockchain operation.

The goal of JD BaaS is to provide flexible and easy-to-use and scalable blockchain system management capabilities to optimally package the underlying systems and provide "box-to-use" blockchain services to facilitate application adoption. It includes the resource layer, block layer, service layer, interface layer and application layer level. The specific structure is shown in the following figure:

JD BaaS platform system architecture

Compared with common public chains such as Ethereum, JD.com has several relatively distinctive features, such as supporting customers to manage accounts in the blockchain system by refining account classification and hierarchical classification and authorization; Modular and pluggable, support customers to choose the consensus protocol and other modules; combine the traditional PKI identity authentication system with the blockchain to solve the problem of key loss and theft.

It is worth noting that the JD BaaS platform supports a variety of blockchain technologies, such as Hyperledger Fabric and Stellar, in addition to JD Chain, for enterprises to freely choose according to business scenarios.

From the concrete application landing scene, Jingdong focuses on quality traceability, digital deposit certificate, credit network, financial technology, digital innovation and other aspects, and has been in 14 sub-areas such as anti-counterfeiting traceability, electronic license, and logistics documents. Realize the landing. Since the application of traceability and deposits is quite extensive in the blockchain industry, it will focus on applications that are relatively less mentioned in other Baas platforms such as credit networks.

In the field of credit network, China's current social credit system is still incomplete and painful, but it is closely related to the quality and speed of social development. The irreparable modification and transparency of blockchain technology contribute to social credit. System. Jingdong mainly uses blockchain technology to improve its credit system and launch related services in terms of digital identity and enterprise general account number.

On the one hand, JD.com's internal business has formed a relatively independent closed-loop, and there are many problems in the business system and the information is difficult to open. According to the statement in the white paper, by adopting the blockchain general account number, JD.com breaks down barriers between users in terms of user information, and shares the abnormal information of enterprise users in time to establish an enterprise data interaction channel in the Jingdong ecosystem. Thereby, it is possible to carry out corporate portraits more accurately and assist the businesses to carry out precise marketing and advertising.

On the other hand, in recent years, the shared economic platform with deposit as the main profit model has been in trouble after rushing, and a large number of user rights have been infringed. Jingdong said that it can empower the credit leasing industry through blockchain technology to block The real-time non-tampering of the chain technology can effectively resolve disputes, reduce the cost of business risk control by sharing account information, and make the transaction transparent and transparent to ease the financial difficulties of the merchants.

Taking ZRobot, an intelligent data service platform of JD.com, as an example, ZRobot uses the Hedgechain to encrypt the important data files in the existing credit leasing business, and obtains a unique hash value, and then performs the blockchain. Deposit certificate. If there is a non-negotiable default dispute on the credit rental platform, the participating party may provide the evidence record of the blockchain digital depository platform of Jingdong District as an electronic evidence that the parties can rely on to the arbitration institution or the court.

At the same time, Jingdong Logistics will also cooperate with various third-party installation service providers in the industry to build a block-based credit information sharing trading platform. JD.com and the service providers jointly maintain engineer information, service records and related evaluation information, of which private information only By chaining in the form of hash value, all parties in the blockchain can query external data without worrying about leaking their core data assets, and at the same time realize the value transfer of credit.

Jingdong Blockchain Digital Depository Platform Product Architecture

In the field of financial technology, JD hopes to use blockchain technology to improve the efficiency of asset securitization, reduce the costs of all parties involved and the overall risks, and build a comprehensive blockchain supply chain financial system to achieve effective circulation of creditor's rights.

In June 18, Jingdong Finance and Huatai Securities Asset Management and Industrial Bank jointly established an asset securitization alliance chain. The project uses core features such as distributed accounting, anti-tampering and real-time secure transmission of blockchain technology. And the data flow of cash flow, products, accounts, etc. is shared and confirmed in real time between the original stakeholders, managers, custodians and other participants.

In the same month, Jingdong Finance-Huatai Asset Management No. 19 Jingdong White Strip Receivables Debt Assets Support Special Plan was successfully established and listed on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange. There are about 50,000 asset data per day during the project. Continually updated.

In March 19th, Jingdong products “Jingdong Steel Truss” explored the application of blockchain technology for the first time in the points industry to build a point verification system. By forming a coalition chain with partners, the traditional 16-digit code verification card was upgraded to a short The link form realizes the information distribution of the three links of card secret distribution, collection and binding, so as to avoid problems such as card misuse and stolen brushing. At the same time, relevant companies can use the point data stored in the blockchain to reach a consensus, greatly reducing the cost of manual reconciliation and improving the efficiency of reconciliation settlement.

03

Summary outlook

On the whole, JD.com recognizes the transformative role of blockchain technology in its business and industry, and has invested a lot of resources to create a system of blockchain network, a smart chain, to enhance its digital technology service capabilities. And with Ali, Tencent in the blockchain competition to obtain a relatively competitive advantage. The network is known as TPS tens of thousands, the transaction confirmation time reaches the second level, and has been widely used in its own business such as Jingdong Steel and ABS.

In the first batch of blockchain information service filing list announced by the National Internet Information Office at the end of March, JD.com also became one of the most registered companies with three filings, including the blockchain data service of Jingdongyun District and the anti-counterfeiting traceability of blockchain in Jingdong District. Blockchain common platform, chain signing. According to the JD white paper data, the Jingdong blockchain anti-counterfeiting traceability platform has more than 1.3 billion uplink data.

With the maturity of Zhixie Chain related technologies, JD.com is trying to export the relevant blockchain services of Zhisheng Chain to the industry and find more partners and customers. It has published a blockchain practice white paper for two consecutive years to showcase many cases and emphasize The ease of use and low threshold of Zhiyi Chain has a strong marketing significance.

However, from the perspective of architecture and positioning, JD's Zhiyi chain is not particularly distinctive from the blockchain BaaS platform of giants such as Ali and Tencent, that is, the competitive advantage is not clear. Most of the application scenarios are not Jingdong original or independent. Yes, the industry already has more solutions.

However, JD recently decided to open source the underlying engine JD Chain code and simultaneously launch the developer community, which not only demonstrates JD's confidence and openness to its technology, but also facilitates more partners and developers to participate in the JD Chain eco-construction. The opportunity to become an opportunity for the rise of the JD.

Jingdong is now facing many difficulties, blockchain technology is almost impossible to become a weapon to reverse the situation, but in terms of blockchain technology, JD.com may become one of the important players in the future.

Author / Hu Wei

Editor / Gong Yuyu

Source: Chain Catcher

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