So that's what I'd like to share today. Thank you

Mr. Ma rarely attends alibaba's product launches, but on June 25 he appeared at a product launch event in Hong Kong, where the world's first electronic wallet based blockchain cross-border remittance service was launched

Over the past year, alibaba and ant gold under block chain technology research and commercial application of work pressure mostly in the ant gold technology lab Ma Yunceng mentioned on many occasions, block chain technology Mainly large data of artificial intelligence technology, the Internet of things technology is ali currently focus into three core technology, the ant gold suit, chairman and CEO well xian also in multiple publicly criticized ICO, called can solve practical problems, to guard against fraud

However, in terms of the project implementation, ant financial has been very cautious. It has kept the technology research and development of the bottom layer of the block chain firmly under wraps

In the first half of this year, baidu and tencent launched their own blockchain platform, BaaS. Jd.com also released a white paper on blockchain

Our BaaS platform is already in public beta, but the platform is like singing and dancing on the stage. What will we do on it when it is launched? As a result, we are preparing more standard solutions. Jiang said Chinese entrepreneurs have been informed that ant financial services will officially launch its own BaaS platform in September

According to jiang guofei, block chain technology has become a major attack direction of financial technology of ali dharma academy. It was founded in October 2017

For Mr. Ma, the blockchain technology has helped him fulfill his original promise, but his expectations for the blockchain are not limited to the fact that the various business fronts of ant financial have more room for imagination due to the blockchain technology

Is the ant suit ready

Jack ma's promise

Mr Ma's interest in the project stems from a promise made years ago

In the early days of Alipay, a Filipino friend once asked him when he could use Alipay in the Philippines and when he could remit the money back home. For Mr. Ma, who had never touched the money, he did not know the exchange rate of cross-border remittances was so high

Alipay wasn't able to deliver the service, but Mr. Ma wrote it down as a business opportunity. Over the years, alipay has been trying to make a breakthrough in cross-border remittance services

Later, Mr. Ma assigned the task to keng jing, ant financial's chairman and chief executive, who managed to poach jiang guofeng, then vice President of NEC, from the United States.

Vice President of ant financial services technology laboratory director jiang guofeng photography: fei zi

Jiang is a technological master. During his work at NEC, he was the head of the company's American research institute. He led the team to make achievements in the fields of IoT big data analysis, computer security software, definable network and other fields

At present, jiang guofei is the vice President and head of the technical laboratory of ant financial services. He has brought advanced Internet of things technology to ant financial services

Since jiang's accession, ant financial has made great progress in the research and development of the Internet of things and block chain technology. Meanwhile, the commercialized landing project has become the target of imitation by the industry, such as the unmanned supermarket based on the Internet of things and biometrics

n the area of blockchain technology, the latest on-premise project is cross-border remittance service

At the June 25 event, Grace of the Philippines, smiling and holding her cellphone, entered her password on the Hong Kong version of alipay AlipayHK in front of the audience of hundreds of attendees. Three seconds later, her family in the far Philippines received her remittance

Grace has been working in Hong Kong for 22 years. There are about 200,000 filipinos like her in Hong Kong. She sends regular remittances to Philippine families

This is the sore point of traditional cross-border remittance business: due to the complexity of the process involving more participation in institutional laws, regulations, exchange rates and other issues, it usually takes 10 minutes to several days to reach the account. Remittance can be received as early as the next day after 7 PM. Be careful when you go to the counter. In the middle, the refund will take longer and may be lost

With the support of the blockchain technology, cross-border remittance can be like local transfer, and there will be almost no other charges except exchange rate

Sitting in the audience, Mr. Ma smiled and watched as the scene unfolded next to him, flanked by Mr. Chan mao-bo, the Hong Kong financial secretary, and Kenneth fok, the group's co-managing director, and Mr. Jing

Whether the cross-border remittance service can be implemented depends on a three-way collaboration: Mynt, the Philippine digital finance company of ant financial Yangtze and hutchison industries, which provides blockchain technology support

When Mr. Ma and Mr. Jing began talking about FinTech at a conference in Hong Kong, the 200 members of the ant financial blockchain cross-border project team at their hangzhou headquarters were more nervous than ever

As the head of the blockchain team, zhang hui (whose name is sheng chu) sent a message to the blockchain team in a large group on the first night, which probably means: don't rush to celebrate when you want the release

The reason why zhang hui wanted to do this was to ensure that the cross-border remittance demonstration at the Hong Kong press conference would not make any mistakes and he was afraid of any problems in the middle. At that time, students were too excited to give timely feedback, zhang said

But his fears were misplaced, and after years of grace's successful presentation, Mr. Ma fulfilled his original promise to his friend in the Philippines in this way

Three minutes later, the members of the blockchain cross-border group did not celebrate too much. They suppressed their inner joy to the next night's celebration. The whole team went to a beer house on wensan road in hangzhou to celebrate

That night, zhang hui was carried back to his house

Brother-in-law to join

For zhang hui, the cross-border remittance project was the longest one that the blockchain team had to tackle. It took a total of seven or eight months to complete the innovation

Zhang hui was dug into ant financial clothing by jiang guofei in September 2017, and now he is the head of the blockchain team. They worked together in NEC. Zhang hui is jiang's subordinate

Jiang came a few months before zhang hui, but he hesitated long before joining the club

Within ant financial services, the technical laboratory led by jiang guofei is playing an increasingly important role

Mr. Ma has often spoken publicly about FinTech, but in the early days ant financial might have been a leading Internet finance company, but it was hard to call it a true financial technology company

Even in the whole ali ecosystem, ali system has always been known as a platform company in BAT. It is a consensus in the industry that ali is inferior to baidu and tencent in technology

Knowing the crux of the problem, Mr. Ma urged Mr. Jing to speed up his deployment of innovative technologies

In fact, ant financial set up the blockchain group as early as 2015, but at that time, it was only an interest group, and its internal position was not high. In early 2016, with the popularity of bitcoin, the blockchain, as the underlying technology, exploded rapidly, and the blockchain began to enter the vision of jack ma and other senior executives of alibaba

At the end of 2016, jiang guofai was working in NEC of the United States. His hometown was dongyang, zhejiang province

Jiang guofang is a typical man of science and technology with clear thinking logic and casual clothes. His office space in hangzhou is not large, with only a few simple tables and chairs

Jiang guoffei is a good talker and speaks fast, compared with the nerdy, technical man, but his mandarin is often mixed with zhejiang's dongyang accent

However, jiang initially hesitated about the invitation, saying that if he agreed to come to ant financial services, it would mean that he would have to give up the superior life in the United States and be separated from his family

Later, jiang asked jing a question: what do you think of failure? At that time, I wanted to bring innovation, but the more innovative things, the higher the failure rate, so I must know their attitude to failure, jiang said

The answer is: you work hard, and it doesn't have to be a failure, because you see that it's not going to work, and it's a good thing for the company

Jiang guofei eventually came to ant financial service and took charge of the entire innovation team. He spent more than two months planning and understood the various businesses of ali ecology. Meanwhile, he also dug zhang hui from NEC and took charge of the block chain team of ant financial service

Alipay has been trying to enter the cross-border remittance business since Mr. Ma's promise to a friend in the Philippines

In February 2017, ant gold clothing and Mynt reached a strategic cooperation. Mynt owns Philippines's electronic wallet GCash. Three months later, Ali's Hongkong electronic wallet AlipayHK was launched on the line. It was jointly established by the Ant King suit and the Yangtze River Hutchison Industrial Company, serving millions of users in Hongkong.

Although GCash and GCash had been seeking a breakthrough in cross-border remittance business, progress was slow until they met the blockchain team led by zhang hui

At the end of last year, the cross-border remittance project was still in the stage of POC(conceptual verification), a financial system. You need to ensure its security and reliability

By this year, jiang and zhang saw the time for cross-border remittance services based on blockchain technology as ripe

After the Spring Festival, Mr. Jing took a few bottles of maotai with him and invited members of the core technical team, including jiang guoffei and zhang hui, to have a drink of strong liquor. The cross-border remittance project of the block chain was officially upgraded to a production-level system

Commercial problem

For jiang and zhang, since they joined ant financial, they have lived an entrepreneurial life and rarely had a leisurely weekend. One worker said that they were often seen working overtime in the whole building every weekend

For alibaba and ant financial, as well as for tencent, baidu and jd.com, blockchain is considered to be a must-see track, but commercial applications are crucial in the race to the top

Anyone who makes a multimillion-dollar app first will have a first-mover advantage in the field, says one industry source

In this year's China Development Forum, Jing Hsien Dong said that the large-scale commercial application of the block chain is a world-class problem, and this technology has not been transformed into practical productivity. In his view, block chain business faces four challenges: security, information protection, transaction performance and incentive mechanism.

Xian said, well the core block chain is that using the technology to create trust mechanism, solve the problem of data assets and people trusted, promote effective collaboration across institutions across individuals But after all digital world, the participants how to trust the data, is a great challenge, and block chain is the foundation for the future digital social trust There is a big difference in the physical world and digital world, the digital world can copy changes, how to ensure and as real physical world there is a big challenge

Jiang knows that to solve these challenges, he has to rely on talented people. Since zhang hui's time, he has been recruiting technical experts from overseas

He joined ant financial on April 26 this year. He is an expert in cryptography. He is a master and postdoc in the department of mathematics, national university of Singapore

I originally wanted to be a mathematician, but then I went to learn cryptology in a random way. Due to block chain, cryptology, an obscure major, became popular

According to zhang, ant financial has three criteria for selecting projects. The second is whether the pain point must be solved through the blockchain, whether there has been a strong central authority there; The third is whether it is technically feasible

For this reason, the ant financial block chain team has set up a technical committee every Thursday at 10:00 am, on the 18th floor of building 1, huanglong international center in hangzhou, and regular technical committee meetings will be held on time

The core of blockchain technology is to talk about consensus. We followed this thinking and had a quick discussion through the technical committee within the organization, and then reached consensus, zhang said

With the continuous participation of outstanding talents, ant financial services in block chain commercial began to make technical breakthroughs

Jing Xiandong said that the ant gold clothing has made a breakthrough in the three major directions: through the innovation of the consensus algorithm, tens of thousands of strokes / seconds of large-scale transaction processing capacity have been realized. Through digital encryption and other technologies, the information security on the block chain can be fully protected. Because there will be different block chains in the future, ants can overcome the problem of value transfer and data exchange between block chains.

One industry source said that ant financial is indeed ahead of the industry in developing the technology at the bottom of the blockchain

Project landing

So far, in addition to cross-border remittance service, five commercial projects of the block chain that ant financial services has opened to the public have been tried in the field of public insurance commodity traceability rental

The first project of ant financial block chain is public welfare. On March 16, 2017, alipay aixin donation platform comprehensively introduced block chain technology to realize the link of donation data, and the source of donations can be traced back

Five months later, shin-mei life mutual insurance co., ltd. launched the first love saving account of the domestic insurance industry, and this account is also the first one in China to use the block chain technology to keep accounts

By the end of the year, the block chain technology independently developed by ant financial services was first applied to food safety and authentic products traceability. Each can of 26 brands of milk powder produced in New Zealand, Australia, had its own identity card, that is, the qr code

After users purchase and receive the milk powder on Tmall international, they can open the scan qr code of alipay APP, and then they can know all the information including the logistics inspection of the date of production and other information

Different from the commodity information entered by the merchants themselves before, the blockchain enables multiple bookkeepers to complete the accounting impartially and independently

Using the block chain to issue an identity card to foreign milk powder is only the first step to Tmall international's global origin traceability plan. In the future, it will cover 63 countries and regions, 3,700 categories and 14,500 overseas brands

The fourth project of ant financial services is renting. For the team of ant financial services block chain, they are deeply impressed by the project of xiong 'an

Jiang was informed of the project during the 11th day of last year. He had just arrived in the United States. As soon as the plane landed and turned on his cell phone, he received the nail news

Zhang hui was on a train back home to huaihua in hunan province when he received the news, along with a dozen other team members, some in wutai mountain, some in henan province, and some in Manila

During the whole National Day period, jiang guofang got up at 8 o 'clock every morning. The first thing he did was to have a conference call while having breakfast, then make plans in the afternoon and then hold a conference call the next day

But for other members in China, such as zhang hui, the morning of jiang guofang is their evening. Our rhythm is to discuss the plan during the day, and then develop the design plan and prepare the materials

Zhang hui remembers that a colleague got married during National Day and held a meeting on the wedding day as usual. Jiang guoffei released him after 10:00 PM

The scheme was finally completed and approved by the androgen new district

At the beginning of 2018, Xiong an new area formally introduced ant block chain technology, landing rental management platform, through the integration of block chain and real name technology, and trusted contract technology, to create a credible data platform for real housing and real tenants.

After the success of the xiong 'an rental project, ant financial will try more in the field of urban life. Besides renting, medical treatment is also a good application scenario

Jiang Guofei believes that block chain technology will usher in more large-scale commercial applications in the next three years. His vision is to create world-class products, but "this needs a process".