Jack Ma, who is the founder of Alibaba is one of the most influential men in Asia. Ant Financial, formerly known as Alipay which is an affiliate company of the Chinese Alibaba Group will be making the biggest investment in the blockchain. Currently, Ant Financial does not have a great presence in the west, but it is very much popular in Asia.
Ant Financial has recently declared that they will implement blockchain technology in its core business. Ant Financial is currently valued at about $150 million. Also, the firm has raised $14 billion from the new capital. Presently the firm is offering payment services in China and increasing its presence in different countries of Asia. Zhang Hui, who is the director of the Blockchain Department at Ant Financial discovered that Blockchain is the most efficient technologies in the world.
Zhang states that they are currently testing blockchain and will implement blockchain technology in the near future.
He also complimented on the fixed and decentralized aspects of the blockchain technology but believes that scalability is the major issue faced by industries currently. Till the blockchain technology is not able to handle about 10,000 transactions in a second, biggest firms will be unwilling to adopt it.
Ant Financial is just the tip of an Iceberg
There are various big firms which are looking to incorporate blockchain into their day-to-day operations. SBI consortium is one of the biggest firms in the Japanese market. There are searching for different ways to deploy XRP in the Japanese financial sector. As of now, XRP has a great presence in Japan.
As per one XRP Executive in Asia, banks now frequently contact XRP to gain access to their platform. Also, Western Union utilized XRP on a trial basis. They reported that XRP has not made any major changes in the currently running platform. On the contrary, XRP replied by announcing that Western Union has just used XRP in 10 transactions. Hence such a lower number of transactions are not enough to build a good dataset.
Various European banks have started using blockchain to replace ‘Letters-of-Credit (LOCs)'. The LOC system is being used for years and is used for international trade. But, LOC system is ineffective as per modern standards. When banks utilized blockchain for the same purpose, transaction time reduced to days from weeks.
Jack Ma sees great future of blockchain
Jack Ma believes that there will be magnificent growth in the blockchain sector. But he believes bitcoin is overvalued. He also said, “It is…not right to become rich overnight by betting on the blockchain. Technology itself isn’t the bubble, but bitcoin likely is.”
Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple shared an opposite view. He said that Bitcoin is like a digital gold but blockchain is a bubble. He is very much optimistic about the future of bitcoin.
