Babbitt's exclusive game, spelling resources, spelling technology – BaaS has become a giant game?

"The original BaaS product has problems, the cost is big and the income is small, and there will be a lot of it will be turned off later."

It was very vigorous when it was released, and there was no sound when it was hung up.

Just like the "flower scorpion messenger problem", we like to hear good news.

Helpless, this is the real situation of the BaaS platform.

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After all, now in 9102, the slogan of “blocking the chain XX year” is not good enough, and practitioners need to show real effort.

Therefore, Babbitt is also struggling to find the correct posture of the blockchain landing.

Recently, BaaS has attracted the attention of Babbitt. On the one hand, Internet giants such as Tencent and Ali have launched their own BaaS, which is in full swing. On the other hand, Babbitt has no intention to find out in the case of collecting and sorting out BaaS. There are more than 30 domestic BaaS platforms. Internet giants, industry giants, chain projects, and currency projects have entered the game. So many roles are involved, indicating that this direction is Have to play.

When Babbitt learned about these BaaS platforms step by step with great excitement, he gradually found that BaaS still did not escape the fate of "the release will be cool, the tears will fall ."

Over 60 BaaS platforms, multiple roles to compete

According to the data collected by qkl123 , there are currently over 60 BaaS platforms at home and abroad. The following are some of the domestic BaaS platforms extracted, with as many as 30.

As can be seen from the above table, as early as 2016, entrepreneurs aimed at BaaS, and the world's earliest proposed BaaS concept began in 2015, and the technical acuity of Chinese people can be seen.

In 2016-2017, there were not many BaaS platforms in China, and there was a blowout in 2018. The number of newly released BaaS platforms was more than the sum of the previous two years.

1/3 has passed in 2019, but according to Babbitt, there is only one project to announce the launch of the new BaaS platform this year.

Does this indicate that the BaaS market is saturated?

However, according to a report released by ZionMarket Research on October 23, 2018, the total value of the global BaaS market in 2017 is about 440 million US dollars, and its value is expected to reach 30.59 billion US dollars by 2024, the global region from 2018 to 2024. The compound annual growth rate of the blockchain-as-a-service market will be 85.09% .

The market prospects are bright, why are newcomers?

It was very vigorous when it was released, and there was no sound when it was hanged.

You must be down to earth and look up at the stars.

The predecessors tasted the sweetness and will attract latecomers to join.

Just like IXO, there are no products. If you send a coin, you can easily realize the freedom of wealth. Naturally, some people will go forward and there will be idealists.

Could it be that BaaS does not make money?

As a result, Babbitt tried to restore the real-world application status of the BaaS platform by collecting data, interviewing relevant technology and sales personnel, rather than reporting the news in various PR drafts.

conclusion as below:

1. High-profile PR, quietly disappeared: Net Gold Holdings, Chuanhua Zhilian, Wan Yun.

Chuanhua Zhilian has laid out BaaS as early as 2017. As a traditional enterprise engaged in logistics, the consciousness is quite high. On the day of the release of BaaS, Chuanhua Zhilian engaged in a large-scale press conference and invited enterprise experts from Baidu Cloud, Netease, Hikvision, Amazon (China) to come and join.

The PR draft on the day of the conference was also very exciting. For the significance of the release of the BaaS platform, the manuscript is written like this:

“The launch of Chuanhua Zhilian Blockchain as a service platform marks that Chuanhua Zhilian will become the first Internet company to promote BaaS in the logistics industry.”

Later, there is no later.

Babbitt contacted the relevant personnel of Chuanhua Zhilian, and the other party told Babbitt:

"We are still exploring some of the company's business scenarios, some have already landed, and some are still in the POC stage."

However, when Babbitt visited the official website of Chuanhua Zhilian, he did not find any introduction about BaaS.

Net Gold Holdings is better than Chuanhua Zhilian, at least released a white paper, and the product is also released on Qingyun AppCenter, developers can try it for free. NetGold's BaaS products have been released for more than a year and a half, and no new news has appeared in the market.

Wan Yun, once one of the important projects in the strategic planning of the Wanxiang Blockchain Lab 2015-2016, is considered to be the first blockchain vertical BaaS service platform in China , and later known as Vitalik Buterin At that time, he was also the chief scientist of the Wanxiang Blockchain Laboratory.

In May 2017, the Wanyun blockchain cloud platform was launched. In September 2017, after Wanyun announced the alliance chain node of the online fun chain, it is difficult to see further developments about Wanyun in the market.

Babbitt consulted Cheng Yu, who was the chief product officer of Wanyun and a business innovation consulting partner of Wanxiang Blockchain. The other party said that he was no longer responsible at the end of 17 years, so he is not sure about the current business situation.

2. Has been turned off: Hainan Cloud, 58 Group.

The two companies are very contrastive, one is the physical industry that has sought a diversified layout, and the other is an Internet company known as “58 City, a magical website”.

One after the other, different fields have been involved in BaaS, and the same ending is ushered in.

The reason why it was turned off, according to HNA's insiders, revealed to Babbitt, " Hai Airlines has completely shrunk the front line, and all non-aeronautical services have not been done ."

"In fact, Wanda, LeTV and HNA, as private enterprises, are at the forefront of science and technology. However, at such a historical moment, because of the side effects of barbaric growth, all fell, and no one was spared."

This in turn involves a deep topic: the digital transformation of traditional enterprises. This article does not do a detailed study.

As for the 58 Group, when 58BaaS was launched, CEO Yao Jinbo also forwarded a circle of friends and left a message: Trust can create a better society .

As everyone knows, 58 City as a "magic" website has been filled with a lot of false information and has been criticized.

"Frozen three feet, not a cold day", solving the problem is even more impossible.

The time when the 58 Group released BaaS happened to be concentrated among the Internet giants such as Ali, Tencent and JD.com, which caused the industry to be unhappy and thought it was a follow-up.

In the recent interviews with the 58BaaS by the media, we learned that 58BaaS has stopped because of a short-term attempt within the group last year .

3. Turning to the public chain: Bubi, cloud, and good.

These three are the earliest entrepreneurial projects in the alliance chain of BaaS in China. In 2018, the public chain was developed.

"In 16 and 17 years, we mentioned more BaaS. That was a concept put forward at that time. Except for one or two projects, most of them did not use BaaS." Insiders from Bubi told Babbitt.

The landing of the cloud elephant looks good. The founder Huang Butian said to Babbitt, "The first cross-institutional blockchain infrastructure of the China Commercial Banking System is built by Yunxiang. Currently BaaS applications include China Minsheng Bank, China CITIC Bank, China. Bank, Suning Bank, etc."

Haopu had worked with Hainan Airlines in 2017. In an interview with Babbitt, he was looking for financing. The founder Ma Yibo talked to Babbitt about the characteristics of the BaaS blockchain. "The BaaS currently on the market is mostly based on certain aspects such as deposit certificates and points, and the good offer provides a platform. Such as the blockchain of Fabric, Ethereum and so on."

The technology sounds very good.

Now search the Internet for "good BaaS" keywords, the information stays in June 2017 .

The founder Ma Yibo also stopped mentioning BaaS for a long time and devoted himself to the aelf public chain project.

4. Still insisting: BATJ, Huawei, Ping An Technology, Paper Gui Technology, Dianrong Network

It can be seen that in this BaaS arms race, the Internet giants have not fallen behind.

Whether the giant layout blockchain can be made still needs further observation, but it is undeniable that they have inherent advantages.

The first is its own cloud service. For example, Baidu, Ali, Tencent, and Huawei all have cloud services, and they are equipped with BaaS, which can stimulate the cloud business. Moreover, in addition to the financial industry, almost all businesses are now built on top of the cloud.

Followed by the scene advantage. Dachangs have mature and stable business models, such as Ali and Jingdong's e-commerce, Ping An Technology's big finance, and Huawei's industrial chain.

Fortunately, startups like Papers Technology are still there.

The rest is state unknown. For example, Yixinyi Qiyun clothing, from June last year, almost no disclosure of the latest progress on BaaS in the market, Babbitt learned from internal staff, the company's business department has been adjusted, the team is still doing things. The BaaS platform of Huada Gene has a login abnormality. When deploying a new channel, Babbitt binds the mailbox according to the system prompt, and the mailbox verification function is always unavailable.

How does BaaS make money?

This topic is really embarrassing. The truth is that many BaaS don't think about how to make money.

" These companies that have released BaaS are in the pit. I can build a chain and say that I have sent BaaS, " a senior blockchain developer who has participated in BaaS development told Babbitt.

“The question is the market, is there so much real demand? ”

“Before I did a few nodes, only two companies took their platform in, and most of the time they were letting developers play for free .”

“It’s all pseudo-needs. Learning and experimenting are real needs, but the amount is not big, and developers usually take their own.”

At present, the BaaS platform that the developer participates in is still accessible, but it has not been maintained.

Let's see how BaaS makes money.

The first is to sell clouds, such as Baidu, Tencent, Ali, Huawei and so on.

(Huawei BCS price details)

Huawei BCS clear price, the charging standard is based on blockchain instance + node.

Taking the professional version as an example, we select an instance with 4 nodes at the same time. The annual fee to be paid is: 1*70000+4*30000= 190,000 yuan .

Of course, the above charges refer to the service management fee of the blockchain service, and do not include the resource costs required for the application.

(Alibaba Cloud BaaS price details)

Alibaba Cloud is also clearly priced, and its charging dimensions are more divided into: blockchain type (Hyperledger Fabric / ant blockchain / enterprise Ethereum Quorum), resource type (alliance / organization), series (basic version / enterprise version) /Enterprise Security Edition), storage fees, etc.

Explain slightly the alliance and organization division in the resource type. Creating a blockchain instance usually requires the operator and the participant. The operator needs to create an alliance instance first, then invite the participants to join the alliance. The participant needs to create an organization. Example.

If we are an operator, choose Hyperledger Fabric, Resource Type Selection Alliance, Series Select Enterprise Edition. In this configuration, users can enjoy 500GB of free storage space, 16-core 32GB computing node specifications, up to 6 compute nodes, up to 2000 TPS.

Under normal circumstances, the cost for one year is: 12*39699=476,000 yuan. However, according to the preferential conditions of Ali BaaS, you can enjoy 15% off when you buy one year, so the price is 405,000 yuan .

The cost of Tencent Cloud TBaaS is not disclosed on the official website. When Babbitt called the sales customer service and asked about the cost of using TBaaS, the customer service did not immediately give a reply, but spent dozens of seconds to temporarily check the information, indicating that the sales staff is not familiar enough with the product .

Subsequently, the salesperson told Babbitt that TBaaS has two configurations of private chain and alliance chain. According to the configuration of 4-core CPU, 8G memory and 50G system disk, the price of one month is about 10,000, and the annual subscription price is 20% discount, 10.1. Ten thousand yuan .

Baidu's BaaS division is very confusing , both the small BaaS, the blockchain product Baidu blockchain engine BBE, and the Baidu smart cloud blockchain solution.

Xiaoman’s BaaS service is currently free, and Xiaoman’s relevant personnel told Babbitt that if they want to deploy with Baidu Cloud, they will charge for cloud services.

The BEE fee is a post-paid model that supports the superchain developed by Ethereum, Fabric and Baidu.

If you deploy the Fabric blockchain, we choose the advanced version of the configuration: 8 cores / 16G of memory, 300GB of hard disk space, less than 4,000 dollars a month, less than 50,000 a year .

Compared with the previous manufacturers, I always feel that Baidu is not right.

Babbitt then entered the Baidu Smart Cloud blockchain solution, charging similar to BEE.

Babbitt clicked on the help file and appeared 404.

It seems that Baidu's BaaS products need to continue to polish.

In general, the price of Huawei and Ali is relatively transparent in the way of selling clouds. The price of Ali is the most expensive, and Baidu is the cheapest.

The other is to sell the entire set of products directly, such as interesting chain, cloud elephant, paper expensive technology.

Take the “Flying Network” of the BaaS platform of the interesting chain as an example. It is divided into three versions: rapid deployment trial version, stand-alone deployment and cluster deployment. We choose the single-machine deployment of the intermediate file. According to the official introduction, this deployment supports 8 cores and 16G ones. The server is equipped with four blockchain nodes, which is cost-effective, but has limited performance and is suitable for alliance chain application development testing.

Server configuration We choose a high version, you can have 8 core processor, 16G memory and 50G system disk. The data disk is 500G and the bandwidth is 10M.

After the election, the node cost for one year is 144,000 yuan, and the server fee is 0.98 million yuan. However, Feiluo is still in the promotion period. If you buy one year, you can enjoy the half price discount of the node. The final price is 81,000 yuan .

Yunxiang did not disclose BaaS sales information and portals on the official website, but Babbitt found a cloud-like quotation form on Qingyun AppCenter.

As shown above, the cost of using the cloud for one year is 500,000 yuan .

Babbitt logged in Qingyun QingCloud AppCenter, tried to deploy, found that 500,000 yuan is the basic service price, in addition to the resource price, such as CPU, memory, hard disk configuration also cost a certain fee.

Babbitt chose the configuration of 8-core CPU, 16G memory and 300G hard disk. The resource cost is 47,000 yuan, which is less than 1/10 of the service fee.

Paper expensive technology set up the BaaS entrance on the official website, but did not announce the fee. After registering and logging in, I saw the blockchain supported by BaaS of Paper Technology is quite rich, and both the public chain and the alliance chain support it.

Babbitt contacted Yi Xiaochun, director of paper products technology. The other party told Babbitt that there are different products in the BaaS platform. For example, ZLedger is divided into development version, enterprise version and customized version. The development version is free to try, the enterprise version is charged by the number of nodes, each node is 4,000 yuan per month, four nodes are configured, and the sum of one year is 192,000 yuan , and some discounts will be made according to the situation. The customized version is quoted according to customer needs.

It can be seen that among the three, the cloud image is the most expensive, and the fun chain is the most powerful.

Another type is to provide solutions, we can not see their specific products, such as the wisdom chain. CEO Dong Ning told Babbitt that they do not provide public cloud services, mainly supporting their own industry applications.

Lose money to earn money, where is the road ahead?

“Now it’s a loss to make a drink,” an entrepreneur who tried BaaS early on, told Babbitt.

“The cloud platform departments of all manufacturers are the most active, and a new technology label is attached, and the purpose is to sell the cloud.”

The person admits that pure cloud is not good for marketing, especially in the financial market . Since the blockchain is closest to finance, the financial cloud of each platform is the most active.

The cloud is the BaaS infrastructure, and the small business is doing BaaS. It is obviously not a good choice . The person said, “It’s all about the BaaS solution. It’s not really pushed. There is no cloud server, and the BaaS service cannot be pushed.”

Babbitt asked about the current sales of cloud-like BaaS. Huang Butian said that the overall situation is at breakeven. When asked why the cloud-based BaaS platform charges so high, the other party did not give a clear response.

Paper sales of the company is also not ideal, Yi Xiaochun said, paper expensive technology is also actively expanding more customers to use the BaaS platform, I hope to achieve satisfactory results this year.

The fun chain is one of the earliest startup companies in China to do blockchain alliance chains. Their BaaS platform is launched late, and it must be thought through. After all, the pits that many people have seen before can be avoided.

However, when Babbitt contacted the interesting chain to ask about the progress of the BaaS application, an insider of the interesting chain said, “BaaS is not currently ideal, and actual demand has not kept up.”

On October 18, 2018, the fun chain held a strategic launch and announced the launch of a new blockchain open service platform, Feiluo. According to the press release, the platform supports rapid deployment and operation and maintenance of blockchain visualization with high-quality cloud services. Management, one-stop application R&D service tools to help blockchain application intelligent security R&D, and build a new ecosystem of secure, interconnected and win-win blockchain with credible value.

Just half a year ago, the original ambition was no longer full.

"In fact, there are still very few real needs. There are not so many small and medium-sized customer groups using BaaS services. Ali and Tencent can understand BaaS because they are doing cloud services themselves. BaaS is just the application above."

Feiluo continues to operate, but more is waiting to see. Because at present, forcible promotion may not be effective.

It is doubtful whether the BaaS business launched by some companies is going on.

Babbitt called Jinshanyun customer service and asked about the basic situation of KBaaS. After changing the customer service twice , the first customer service obviously did not know that Jinshanyun had BaaS business. The second customer service only made a simple data registration to Babbitt. The last reply was to need to send business information. Babbitt has not received the reply from the party until last night.

Babbitt also dialed the sales call of the Chinese food chain, dialed twice during working hours, and no one answered .

As for the big manufacturers, it seems that the promotion is a bit bigger than that of the startups, but according to the industry insiders who contact these big manufacturers, they are not good enough.

"In this environment, it is actually quite difficult to push BaaS services. Ali is also selling them in their overall solution, providing a diversified service for group customers to choose."

The person further stated that ant Jinfu promotes BaaS, and it still needs to integrate ants' own technical resources and industrial resources.

“Like ant Jinfu doing traceability, you need to integrate your own traffic advantages, brand advantages, and technological advantages.”

Is BaaS worth doing?

"The original BaaS product has problems, the cost is big and the income is small , and there will be a lot of turns in the future." A practitioner who had worked on one of the above BaaS platforms told Babbitt.

The first is the hardware and software costs.

Now all BaaS are actually built on the next level of k8s (short for Kubernetes, which is used to manage containerized applications on multiple hosts in the cloud platform), and then build a complete set of BaaS based on the K8s API. Orchestration system.

This means that BaaS requires a set of K8s resource pool overhead, which is quite costly.

At the software development level, developing a BaaS platform, there is currently no too high technical difficulty. Because once the first mover made it, with the flow of these technicians, they brought technology into the new company, and the cost of redeveloping a BaaS would be greatly reduced. After all, the early pits were stepped over.

Followed by operation and maintenance. Doing BaaS requires a dual operation and maintenance, one part is the operation and maintenance of the bottom k8s, and the other is the operation and maintenance on the BaaS level based on the chain. At present, there are many tools for operation and maintenance of resources such as K8s. But for the operation and maintenance tools on the BaaS level is not enough. Involving the actual production of the BaaS environment, you still need to develop the own operation and maintenance tools.

Again, the cost of personnel . There are two types of people who need to develop BaaS: First, they understand the container cloud. These people are more expensive in the cloud market. The average annual salary is about several hundred thousand to one million.

In addition, I understand the blockchain. Because of the chain arrangement, the micro-senior talent costs are relatively high.

The last category is the regular front-end technicians, which are relatively low cost.

In general, these three types of people are much more expensive than the talents of other clouds.

The front is the cost of the technical level, and the cost of non-technical is actually quite impressive.

The BaaS model that can be seen now is bundled with clouds for sale. For the user, one situation is that only the cloud service is needed, and the BaaS merchant can sell the BaaS service by bundling or discounting.

The other is to sell cloud resources in the name of selling BaaS, which is equivalent to the main collection or cloud resources.

Both modes are far-fetched. In the actual sales process, the pressure on the sales staff is also very large, and it is not enough to sell. It takes a lot of energy to talk to customers about this matter.

"Aside from the establishment of the BaaS model, and the comprehensive management and deployment of N multiple chains on a cloud platform similar to pass, just the description of the cost you can see from the front, you will I found that the first 99 steps are all invested, and there are a lot of extra inputs, but in the end, how to make money is very weak, and it is not very clear. The company is going to make money. For them, this is obviously not the best product choice. type."

Yi Xiaochun also said that the operation of the BaaS business line requires a lot of work, including early technical research, product development, and later product maintenance and business operations. The total cost adds up to 10 million levels.

Economically, it is not a good model, and from the perspective of the fundamentalist blockchain, BaaS is not a good product of the decentralized thinking of the blockchain.

BaaS landing, difficult.

But from another perspective, the BaaS form is well understood. As a teaching platform or a poc platform, in the early days of the industry, building BaaS can help educate users, expand industry boundaries, and attract developers.

"However, as the industry progresses, 2019 is still playing BaaS, which is actually more of a team's own selfishness, rather than a decision made from the company's overall situation. " The aforementioned anonymous person said.

The reason for this phenomenon is nothing more than a blockchain, and there is still no good profit model.

"If the blockchain can have a better profit model and a better business model that conforms to economics and objective laws, if the product model emerges, everyone will still be profitable to do things that can make money. If the blockchain is late Late can't find a good way to make money. For teamleader or project manager, what they can do is BaaS, which can be explained to the boss, maybe BaaS. The last thing is to drag the word, BaaS first year , after the development of the industry and so on."

However, from a practical point of view, BaaS has been tirelessly promoting it from 2016 to 2019, at least indicating that there is certain objective and reasonable existence.

"BaaS products and business models, we believe that there is no problem, many large manufacturers are still continuing to work in this direction. In the future, with the deployment of distributed applications, BaaS still has a large market space. I think BaaS is similar to cloud computing. The technology continues to mature, and after the products are continuously polished, the cost will gradually decrease, and the benefits will gradually produce scale effects.” Yi Xiaochun said.

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Pay tribute to the blockchain practitioners who dare to say the real status of BaaS applications above! Babbitt will continue to pay attention to the application of blockchain.

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