Babbitt Original | Starting domestic alliance chain, this is the best era for blockchain to help Chinese manufacturing

There is such a point of view that the real competition in science and technology is not market value, not market share, but who has mastered key technologies .

In the Internet era, China is often controlled by others. This is true of Windows and Android operating systems, and even more so in the chip industry.

Today, the Internet, which has created three super-industries of commerce, social and entertainment, has reached the point of change. The open, transparent and credible characteristics of the blockchain can upgrade the information Internet to the value Internet.

The Internet is here. Does China have a chance to change from a "player" to a "referee"?

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This article attempts to start from the "strikes" of different alliance chain teams in China and see what the players in the Chinese alliance chain are doing. Second, look at how Chinese entrepreneurs can achieve on-chain after the blockchain has become a national strategy. Third, look at the era of the Internet, how China can seize the initiative and commanding heights of emerging industries based on alliance chains.

Give a conclusion first. The source of blockchain technology is overseas, but this time, we have a great opportunity.

Five years after the birth of the alliance chain, overseas projects took the lead

Bitcoin was born in 2009, and in the following 5 years, Bitcoin became the only application of the blockchain.

Until 2015, Ethereum was born, which added smart contract technology to the blockchain. This year, international giants were the first to smell the breath of technological change, but they found that based on performance, supervision and other reasons, the alliance chain with access mechanism is the "nuclear weapon" to upgrade the original industry and open up new business models.

At the end of 2015, the Linux Foundation launched the open source alliance chain Hyperledger (hyperledger). Subsequently, IBM joined and launched the underlying development platform of the Hyperledger Fabric alliance chain. In the same year, the R3 blockchain alliance was established, and the open source blockchain platform Corda was launched.

The former has more than 250 participating companies and has launched hundreds of application cases (including POC projects). It is the world's most competitive alliance chain development platform. The latter has about 300 member units from the global banking industry and is unique on the financial track.

Since then, more overseas platforms such as Microsoft Coco, Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA) have been launched.

In less than 3 years, these platforms are technologically leading the world, and their members have almost included the global mainstream industry giants, including most of the early players in China's blockchain.

Timing is important. Once the window of opportunity is closed, the game is over.

The domestic alliance chain has accumulated a lot, and has a place in the "N country melee"

In China, the crazy public chain ICO in 2016-2017 made the public "talk about the chain color change". Even so, a group of people who dare to eat crabs were born here.

After sorting out, the domestic alliance chain projects are mainly divided into three categories. First, the underlying development platform of the alliance chain , such as FISCO BCOS, which is open sourced by Golden Chain Alliance. Second, the Alliance Chain BaaS platform , such as the Ant Blockchain BaaS platform. Third, alliance chain technology output services , such as Funchain Technology. They cut in from different dimensions. For 5 years, in the Warring States era of the alliance chain, China has the ability to compete with other countries.

1. The underlying operating system is catching up, and the domestic alliance chain technology moat has begun to take shape

Whoever masters the core technology can have the initiative to compete. In the field of blockchain, the core competition is undoubtedly the underlying operating system.

In this regard, FISCO BCOS is one of the domestic projects with the strength to side-by-side with Hyperledger Fabric. It is a well-known masterpiece of the underlying development platform of the domestic alliance chain.

But it does not happen overnight. As early as 2016, an organization called the Financial Blockchain Cooperation Alliance (Shenzhen) (referred to as the Golden Chain Alliance) landed in Shenzhen, and its sponsors include more than 20 financial institutions and financial institutions such as Weizhong Bank and Shenzhen Fintech Association. Technology companies, Weizhong Bank also led the establishment of the Golden Chain Alliance open source working group to explore the value of blockchain in the financial field.

In 2017, FISCO BCOS was born on the basis of the Golden Chain Alliance open source working group and announced that it has become an open source underlying platform for the financial-level alliance chain that emerged earlier in China.

Following FISCO BCOS, the one account chain created by Ping An Group's Financial One Account Connect was launched in February 2018. The underlying architecture of One Account Chain is called FiMAX. This system is derived from Hyperledger, but after optimization and innovation, it has also become an excellent domestic blockchain operating system.

In fact, 2017-2018 is almost the first year that Chinese Internet giants entered the alliance chain. Baidu Super Chain (Xuperchain) and JDChain of JD.com both passed away in the past two years. Before 2017, almost all tools available to Chinese developers were Hyperledger Fabric, and obstacles such as technology and communication became insurmountable challenges for developers. By 2019, the fully domesticized alliance chain platform led by the giants has become the best choice for most developers to test the blockchain. These platforms have also become the backbone of the development of the Chinese alliance chain.

2. Blockchain BaaS came into being, and it has never been easier to go on-chain.

Blockchain technology has a very high technical threshold. Building a blockchain application directly on the underlying operating system is still a challenge for most Chinese developers. This gave birth to the development of two-tier networks including the BaaS platform.

For example, Ant Blockchain, which is a blockchain company under Ant Financial, launched the Ant Blockchain BaaS platform in June 2018. Here, the alliance chain developers do not need to access its underlying code, as long as it is based on development The interface can build a one-stop chain, which is very convenient.

Based on Alibaba's strong business ecology, the ant blockchain BaaS has landed in more than 40 scenarios in 2 years, such as blockchain cross-border remittances, product traceability, supply chain finance, judicial depository, public welfare, etc.

Although FISCO BCOS is the underlying development platform, in 2018-2019, Weizhong Bank also open-sourced the middleware platform WeBASE as a bridge between the underlying and application layers. At the next level of WeBASE, Weizhong Bank has added application solutions such as entity identity and trusted data exchange WeIdentity, message collaboration WeEvent, etc., and it is completely open source. These protocols allow developers to build a house directly on the foundation and make a DAPP. The principles are similar to BaaS, reducing the development threshold.

The result of this "caring service" is obvious. At present, FISCO BCOS has more than 60 real blockchain applications, covering government affairs, finance, public welfare, copyright, supply chain, education and other fields. Counting POC projects, Its DAPP has already exceeded 300.

Recently, Ren Zhengfei said: "The blockchain is not worth mentioning in front of a quantum computer and it is easy to be cracked." In fact, although Huawei has caught up with the late episode, its blockchain layout is not sloppy. Its iconic product is the BaaS platform BCS (Blockchain Service). With the help of Huawei Cloud, it can quickly build enterprise-level blockchain industry solutions and applications for developers.

Compared with the above giant players, China also has a number of alliance chain startup teams, such as QuChain Technology, Cloud Elephant Technology, Bystack, etc., whose model is to directly output blockchain solutions to partners. Like FunChain, it has cooperated with Zheshang Bank to create 5 platform products such as "Zheshang Chain", and even it has created an employee rights management system for Google.

▲ On October 26, People's Daily articles promoted the development of blockchain technology

National team BSN enters, China's independent global infrastructure network is forming

In 2018, General Secretary Xi Jinping proposed at the academicians' conference of the two academies that blockchain is a representative of the new generation of information technology.

At the beginning of 2019, the Central Network Information Office issued the "Regulations on the Management of Blockchain Information Services", and the blockchain industry parks across the country took root.

On October 24, 2019, the blockchain was upgraded to a national strategy, and a wave of blockchain entrepreneurship is slowly taking shape in China.

As early as ten days ago, the BSN of the "national team" background surfaced.

BSN stands for Blockchain-based Service Network, which is a blockchain service network. It was initiated and established by 6 companies including the National Information Center, China Mobile Communications, China UnionPay, China Mobile Financial Technology, Smart Government and Enterprise, and Beijing Jujube Technology.

On December 1, Shan Zhiguang, director of the Information and Industrial Development Department of the National Information Center, said at the BSN member conference that China's achievements in the field of alliance chains are obvious to all, but because there is no unified technical standard, business data is not as interactive as islands. This makes it very expensive for latecomers to deploy blockchain applications, which limits the popularity of blockchain in China.

"The industry lacks the recognized public infrastructure of the underlying blockchain. " Shan Zhiguang said that BSN can solve the four problems of the current development of the Chinese alliance chain: the high cost of building the chain, the heterogeneous underlying platform, the inability to interact with the data, and the difficulty in promoting applications.

The underlying technology of BSN's alliance chain originally adopted Hyperledger, but on December 1st, BSN signed a cooperation agreement with Weizhong Bank to use FISCO BCOS as the underlying platform of the alliance chain adapted by BSN.

Based on the top-level planning of the National Information Center, China National UnionPay and China Mobile and other "national teams" have made great efforts. Weizhong Bank and FISCO BCOS provide the underlying technical support. The design vision of BSN is extremely ambitious. It may not only become a national underlying network for blockchain development, but also a global infrastructure network based on blockchain technology, which is controlled by China.

This is not an exaggeration. Based on the resources of China Mobile's 31 provincial companies, the full moon BSN has completed network deployments in 25 cities including Hong Kong and Singapore, and another 30 cities are being deployed. It is planned that by 2020, BSN can complete the deployment of 200 cities worldwide.

▲ On December 1, BSN signed a contract with FISCO BCOS

FISCO BCOS was selected into BSN, and the dawn of the ecology of the domestic alliance chain industry under the concept of open source is emerging

In China, FISCO BCOS is currently the only bottom-level platform of the domestic alliance chain selected into BSN. It is not difficult to analyze the reasons. First, the underlying technology platform of BSN must be the alliance chain, and FISCO BCOS, the leading technology, is undoubtedly the best "candidate". Second, open source is the core concept of building infrastructure and public platforms, and the two parties are highly consistent on this point.

We have sorted out the six characteristics of FISCO BCOS, a one-stop development kit, a high-speed smart contract matching engine, an efficient consensus mechanism that supports PBFT and RAFT, a scenario-based privacy protection, support for all national secret standards, and the ability to achieve penetrating supervision Program. These characteristics are very suitable for Chinese companies to develop alliance chain application development.

On the list of China Trust and Information Institute's 2019 trusted blockchain evaluation, FISCO BCOS obtained two authoritative certifications of function and performance tests with a 100% pass rate. Its single chain performance reached 20,000 TPS, breaking the performance bottleneck of blockchain technology, and The comparison of overseas projects is not inferior.

Looking back at the history of science and technology development, China's loss of the market in many areas is not entirely due to inferior technology. Overseas companies are good at building an industrial ecosystem, and Chinese companies have no advantage in relying on one product or one company .

Fan Ruibin, head of Weizhong Bank's blockchain, told Babbitt that the alliance chain entrepreneurship is a funnel model: it has the most applications, followed by the BaaS platform, and the least underlying technology. FISCO BCOS chose the most difficult path, because the core value of the blockchain is to create mutual trust, which determines that it is a multi-party collaboration tool. Only when more people participate in it can technology be used.

Technically open source, creating an industrial ecosystem has become an inevitable choice for FISCO BCOS.

" Cooperate with partners as much as possible to build a domestic open source alliance chain ecosystem, and use ecological methods to build the competitive advantages of Chinese companies in the blockchain era. " Fan Ruibin said.

At present, FISCO BCOS has undoubtedly formed China's largest domestic open source alliance chain ecosystem. According to public information, around 10,000 individual developers, more than 500 institutions and enterprises, and more than 60 applications that have been running stably in the production environment have been gathered around FISCO BCOS. In July 2019, at the third China Blockchain Development Contest hosted by the China Electronics Standardization Research Institute of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the underlying platform for four applications in 11 award-winning projects was FISCO BCOS, accounting for 36%.

Weizhong Bank also made many successful application cases based on FISCO BCOS. In June 2019, under the guidance of the Shenzhen Local Financial Supervision Bureau, Weizhong Bank and the Shenzhen Internet Finance Association developed the nation's first “benefit withdrawal platform for online lending institutions from online voting decision-making platforms”, which resolved Mutual distrust. As of the beginning of December, the platform has been applied in 25 online loan institutions in Shenzhen, with more than 390,000 lenders being introduced, and the principal to be received was more than 21.43 billion yuan.

In July 2019, Weizhong Bank and People's Network established a news copyright alliance based on FISCO BCOS, realizing the onlineization and automation of the entire process of digital copyright confirmation, monitoring, infringement forensics, and litigation. At present, the platform has confirmed the rights of all the hundreds of mainstream media and put it on the chain, accumulating millions of original news on the chain.

Becoming the underlying technology platform of BSN is also a key step for FISCO BCOS to build an ecosystem and expand applications. It is likely to become a global development platform for the bottom of the alliance chain, which may be a new opportunity for Chinese entrepreneurs brought by technological trends and national policies.

The starting gun fired, where is the future of the China Alliance Chain?

From giants to entrepreneurial teams, from underlying operating systems to BaaS platforms, from system empowerment to pure technology output, from financial applications to full-scenario applications. From the spontaneous creation of commercial organizations to the admission of national teams. At present in China, the panorama of the entrepreneurial ecosystem of the alliance chain has begun to take shape.

With the introduction of the 1024 policy, the ecological industry of the Chinese alliance chain is accelerating to land. Technically open source, industrially building an ecological circle, and application scenarios penetrating into various industries, this is destined to be the focus of the domestic alliance chain in the next few years.

On the technical level, the challenges of the alliance chain have three parts, namely performance, interactivity and security privacy. Taking cross-chain as an example, the bottom layer of BSN uses different alliance chain development platforms, but the upper-level applications need to interact. Cross-chain is a technical breakthrough that cannot be avoided. However, in the field of alliance chain, cross-chain has not appeared a good decentralized solution.

The world is currently on the same starting line. Whoever gets the ticket for a technological breakthrough first can go one step ahead of the war.

Giants in the industrial ecosystem have natural advantages, including Weizhong Bank, Ant Blockchain, JD.com, Baidu, Ping An, etc. Blockchains are rapidly infiltrating upstream and downstream partners in different fields through their original industrial resources. This can be seen from the blockchain applications that have been exposed since 2018.

The difference is that FISCO BCOS takes open source as the entrance, and constantly gathers the native alliance chain developers. The Ant blockchain BaaS relies more on the industry influence of Ant Financial and Alibaba to complete the full-link construction of the upstream and downstream of the industrial chain. And JD.com, Baidu, Huawei, Ping An, FunChain … all of them have continuously widened their tentacles and depth from an ecological perspective. A battle may be imminent, and the time window for entrepreneurs is running out.

The application scenario is the biggest advantage of the Chinese project owner. This is due to China's rich and diverse industrial ecology, which provides fertile soil for the landing of the alliance chain.

However, the alliance chain still lacks a killer application. In addition, the cost of building a chain is high, and the effect of improving efficiency and reducing fees is not significant. More Chinese entrepreneurs are still watching. The explosion of the alliance chain still requires practitioners to pay more time.

In 2009, Satoshi Nakamoto knocked down the last line of Bitcoin code, and the blockchain was born. In 2019, IBM, Microsoft, Tencent, Alibaba … almost all giants have joined the competition on the blockchain track.

The wind started at the end of Qingping, and a revolution around blockchain technology is beginning. This is clearly an opportunity for the Chinese economy and industry in transition. We look forward to seeing good results.

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