Payment giant PayPal first involved in the blockchain investment and participated in the Cambridge Blockchain A round of financing

According to "Forbes" reported on April 2, the US PayPal participated in the start-up company Cambridge Blockchain A round of financing. Just as Bitcoin can store value without a bank, the Cambridge blockchain is committed to providing individuals with an online identity and does not require intermediate media such as Facebook.

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This is the first “electric shock” blockchain investment by PayPal. It hopes to explore how to use the Cambridge blockchain platform to allow its users to prove their identity while preventing personal information from being unnecessarily shared. Unlike Facebook logins, the platform user can control who can see their identity information.

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Prior to the announcement of this announcement, we knew that PayPal's involvement in the blockchain industry was limited to the fact that it submitted a patent to speed up the cryptocurrency transaction rate in March 2018, and in an internal project, through the issuance of tokens. Form to motivate employees to participate.

Today, the $121 billion PayPal participating blockchain startup company can reveal its future use of the blockchain. A company spokesperson said:

We invested in the Cambridge blockchain, which is dedicated to applying blockchain to digital identity. We believe this may benefit financial services companies including PayPal.

In May 2018, the Cambridge blockchain received a $7 million Series A round of financing from HCM Capital, an equity investment arm of Taiwanese manufacturing giant Foxconn. This financing is an extension of the A round of financing, Omidia network also participates in the investment. Both PayPal and the Cambridge blockchain did not disclose the amount of financing. Until recently, the SEC's documents showed that the Cambridge blockchain raised $3.5 million in new capital.

The Cambridge Blockchain program uses new capital for recruitment and R&D. Currently, it has 15 employees, 11 of whom are responsible for the main project in Boston, 3 in Paris to assist this year's first technical promotion in Luxembourg, and a newly hired employee in Beijing responsible for some of Foxconn's pre-projects.

Cambridge blockchain technology is designed to increase Internet identity control for approximately 60 Luxembourg residents, but Foxconn uses its technology in other ways, such as by directly connecting suppliers and manufacturers without having to build a central warehouse.

If you don't have a central warehouse, you can save a lot of inventory costs.

Jack Lee, managing director of Foxconn Ventures, said that he was a member of the Cambridge blockchain board and introduced the startup to PayPal last year.

Matthew Commons, CEO of Cambridge Blockchain, said in an interview with Forbes that he first partnered with PayPal in the 2018 European Financial Technology Accelerator (Fintech Europe 2018), when PayPal was co-organizer. The accelerator is dedicated to helping early-stage startups address regulatory requirements such as increasingly stringent General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) and other privacy factors.

The final stop of the Accelerator event is in Luxembourg, and as soon as PayPal has an office in the country, the Cambridge blockchain is also preparing to launch its first product show in partnership with Luxembourg-backed LuxTrust.

We envision users having more direct control over their personal data in the future. At the same time, we believe in the importance of an open, interoperable infrastructure. We hope that people will truly get rid of the constraints of specific platforms and have more choices.

However, the potential high risk of PayPal investment is highlighted and begins to get complicated. Facebook became the notorious personal information owner, a $480 billion social network that receives advertisers and politicians commissions and sends potential advertising messages to targeted users.

In May 2018, David Marcu, the former president of PayPal and now Facebook executive, set up a team to study how to use blockchains for social networks. As Facebook deepens the potential impact of the blockchain on its business model, a quality industry will emerge and explore the issue and seek solutions.

In addition, so far, Microsoft, IBM, MasterCard, Cambridge blockchain and other companies have joined the Decentralized Identity Foundation. This non-profit organization aims to create an open ecosystem that shares the benefits of digital identity, and individuals can earn income by sharing their identity information or accepting and communicating that information. In May 2018, blockchain startup Blockstack announced an investment of $1 million to create a "killer" application against Facebook.

A PayPal spokesperson said that while the Cambridge blockchain is working to transfer identity for various uses to private or public links, PayPal's application focus is still financial. He says:

This investment will allow us to explore potential application cooperation for blockchain technology.

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