Ant on the chain: Ant Financial and the road to the blockchain of large companies
Editor: Ms. A Interview, author: Match Q
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Design: Sun Jiadong WeChat Official Account: Jiazi Guangnian (ID: jazzyear)
The blockchain industry is now like a diving whale. Before it really surfaces, you will not know how many people have been with it.
According to industry insiders, in 2018, all major Internet companies will enter the blockchain. To be more precise, everyone suddenly discovered: "So you are here too".
Among all those who are eager to try, the Ali series has the strongest performance. In fact, Ant Financial established a blockchain team as early as 2015. According to the "2017 Global Blockchain Enterprise Patent Ranking" released by the intellectual property industry media IPRdaily and the incoPat Innovation Index Research Center, Alibaba ranked first in the world with a total of 49 patent applications - and all of these patents came from Ant Financial.
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Top ten of "2017 Global Blockchain Enterprise Patent Ranking"
Recently, "Jiazi Guangnian" exclusively interviewed the blockchain team of Ant Financial in Hangzhou.
Its director Zhang Hui (nickname "Sheng Chu") told "Jiazi Guangnian" that the core of blockchain technology is a "trusted connector", and the vision of the Ant Financial blockchain team is to "build a production-level Trust connectivity infrastructure".
In the past 14 years, Ant Financial Services in the Alibaba ecosystem has developed the national-level application Alipay, and has continuously improved the financial ecosystem in the fields of payment, micro-credit, insurance, and credit security. The rich accumulation has cultivated the soil for the blockchain.
Ant Financial's exploration is a typical sample of large companies' efforts in the blockchain field.
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Origins: From "Hackathon" to Tech Lab
Qiu Honglin, nicknamed "Xipi", is a post-90s engineer of Ant Financial. Recently, he posted a blind date post, but no one cared about it in the first month, but when he added "blockchain engineer" in the introduction, he received more than 200 private messages from girls within a few days:
"Do you have Bitcoin? Do you mine? Do you pay your salary in RMB or Bitcoin?"
The relationship between Xipi and the blockchain originated from an internal interest group formed by Ant Financial in 2015. At that time, the concept of blockchain was only a small hotspot in the domestic technology circle.
In 2016, this interest group participated in the company's internal hackathon challenge, 48 hours without sleep, and realized a POC (proof of concept) of a blockchain charity fund tracking application.
DEMO simulates a public welfare organization, digital donors and recipients. The link is not long, but it can run through the whole, realizing the step-by-step tracking of donation information flow. The records are completely open, transparent, tamper-proof, and not controlled by the center .
The exploration of Xipi and his colleagues is the bottom-up germination of blockchain in Ant Financial. At the same time, Ant Financial has also begun to pay attention to the blockchain from top to bottom at the strategic level.
Hu Danqing (nicknamed "Danhua"), who is now the senior product manager of Ant Financial's blockchain team, started researching blockchain around June 2016. At a weekly meeting, Danhua, who was working in the strategy department at the time, met with the technical department and found that both sides were paying attention to the blockchain: the two lines of exploration crossed, and the action began to accelerate.
"Alipay solves the trust problem of user payment. We soon discovered that blockchain technology is also about trust, and it is a way to use technology to form trust." Danhua told "Jiazi Guangnian".
At that time, the project was marked with a blockchain logo and placed in the most prominent position on the mobile Alipay donation platform, and immediately became the public welfare project with the highest traffic on the entire platform. "Hearing Impaired Children Regain a New Voice" finally raised 198,000 yuan for 10 hearing impaired children, and nearly 50,000 people participated in the donation.
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"Hearing Impaired Children Regain a New Voice" Project Donation Information Tracking
By the end of 2016, the blockchain team of Ant Financial was officially established, and the organizational structure changed from virtual to real.
In February 2017, as Jiang Guofei joined Ant Financial as the vice president of Ant Financial and established a technical laboratory, the blockchain team was incorporated into the "Ant Financial Technical Laboratory" system that focuses more on cutting-edge technology research.
So far, after half a year, under the two-way promotion of unintentional technical challenges and the overall strategic layout, the blockchain has finally changed from the initial "dotted line organization" in Ant Financial to an important technical direction for the company to focus on. "Brother-in-law "Jiang Guofei is now talking more and more about the Ant Financial blockchain in public.
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Style of play: "Production-level alliance chain"
There is a cartoon in the meeting room of the "Brighting Roof" on the 22nd floor of the Huanglong Times, the Hangzhou headquarters of Ant Financial, which depicts two little ants under the starry sky. Jiang Guofei told "Jiazi Guangnian" that these eight words can just describe his positioning of the blockchain team.
Looking up at the starry sky is because blockchain technology has unlimited potential.
Jiang Guofei believes that blockchain will become a technology with a wider impact than AI. The reason is: an important difference between the digital world and the physical world in the past is that the physical world really exists and cannot disappear out of thin air, but data can be deleted, changed or copied without leaving traces; and blockchain technology can make the digital world like The physical world is as authentic and credible as it is to achieve data sharing and consistency. On this basis, shared decision-making and smart contracts will be realized in the future, and efficiency will be unprecedentedly improved. In short, blockchain technology will become the cornerstone of trust in the future digital society.
To be down-to-earth, we must "keep in awe" now, because the current technology is still in the early stage of tackling, and there are still many bottlenecks waiting to be broken through.
The affinity between Ali and Ant Financial's own business and blockchain technology lies in the fact that blockchain technology is the interaction of logistics, information flow, and capital flow, while Ali's own e-commerce and logistics systems, Ant Financial's payment, Businesses on capital flow can be extensively linked with blockchain technology.
Ant Financial's blockchain has not set foot in virtual digital assets, and keeps a distance from tokens and digital currencies. At present, all landing scenarios of Ant Financial's blockchain are aimed at "production-level alliance chains".
Sheng Chu, the leader of the blockchain team, has rich experience in P2P (peer-to-peer network). He told "Jiazi Guangnian" that the existing network is mainly for information exchange, and the core value of blockchain is "value exchange". This value should not be a virtual value, but must correspond to the actual offline physical asset value:
"Instead of creating a new thing, building trust in this existing world requires solving too many problems."
A few examples can clearly reflect Ant Financial's "production-level alliance chain" approach:
In November last year, Xiong'an New District announced the signing of a cooperation agreement with Ant Financial Services. Blockchain technology is the highlight. Ant Financial Services will undertake the construction of the digital Xiong'an blockchain infrastructure platform. The first people's livelihood application supported by the platform - Xiongan New District blockchain rental platform is a good embodiment of Ant Financial's blockchain technology value of "focusing on real value exchange".
Some media said that this is the first blockchain rental platform in China, and it has opened the government-led "national team" model. Listed housing information, identity information of landlords and tenants, and housing lease contract information disclosed on the platform will be verified by multiple parties and must not be tampered with. Ant Financial provides core technical support for this application.
The project in Xiong’an New District is in line with the core positioning of Ant Financial’s blockchain team for blockchain technology: connecting infrastructure of trust.
In other scenarios, Ant Financial's blockchain has focused on developing two landing applications: donation tracking and product traceability.
The development process of these two applications reflects a typical path for large companies to develop blockchains—both technical teams and ready-made application scenarios complement each other.
The scene of charity tracking is as mentioned above, from within Ant Financial: Based on the public welfare project launched by Xipi and his colleagues in July 2016, the blockchain team further explored the productization of charity tracking. By 2017 In March 2019, the Alipay love donation platform fully introduced blockchain technology, and all donation data was uploaded to the chain. As of January 2018, the donation information recorded by blockchain technology has covered 21 million users donating 367 million yuan to 831 public welfare projects, and the number of donations has reached 220 million.
The scene of commodity traceability comes from Ali Ecology: In March 2017, Tmall began to look for new technical solutions for the anti-counterfeiting and traceability of food imported from Australia and New Zealand. Ant Financial’s blockchain exploration can just solve such problems. After a series of processes such as basic research and development, concept verification, node deployment, and testing, the traceability project was launched in September 2017. The entire technical solution also combines physical anti-counterfeiting technology to ensure that the virtual data on the chain corresponds to the physical object.
Consumers can now scan the QR codes on the packaging of imported food from Australia and New Zealand to see various logistics information about the products passing quality inspection overseas, passing through overseas warehouses, domestic bonded warehouses, sales on Tmall and halfway.
In October 2017, the blockchain technical team further exported this technical solution for the traceability of Moutai.
The product traceability application entrusts the idea of "one item, one code" of the ant financial blockchain team: in the future, all social products from production, distribution to sales will be linked to the chain, and everyone will develop the mind of authentic product traceability— — Just like everyone is used to "scan and pay" now, in the future they will get used to "scan and trace".
Commodity traceability will be a scenario that the Ant Financial blockchain team will continue to focus on in 2018. After mastering the real and real-time information of commodity circulation, it will be a matter of course to cut into supply chain finance, and even reshape the production and supply system.
Sheng Chu told "Jiazi Guangnian" that next, they will also build a blockchain BaaS platform.
According to Danhua, the entire Ali, including Ant Financial, "is already queuing up for some scenarios", and in the vision of the Ant Financial blockchain team, the application layer will also be open to other organizations and teams in the future.
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Ant Financial Technology Grand Strategy: "BASIC+Connection+Risk Control+Credit"
In early February 2018, the annual meeting of the Ant Financial Technology Laboratory was held in Longjing, Hangzhou. Sheng Chu and the person in charge of the research and development of the Internet of Things technology sang a song "Holding Hands", implying the combination of blockchain technology and Internet of Things technologies. , will correspond to a variety of scenarios. In the future era of "Internet of Everything", automatic value exchange is a core application of blockchain technology.
"Brother-in-law" Jiang Guofei wrapped a big red envelope for the overall blockchain team at the annual meeting, hoping that the team "become an international leader" in the new year and can provide full resource support.
"The big map of BASIC + connection + risk control + credit is the core thing of financial technology obtained by Ant Financial after so many years of practice." Cheng Li said.
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Ant Financial CTO Cheng Li revealed the BASIC strategy at the 2017ATEC Conference
BASIC refers to five technical directions: blockchain (Blockchain), machine intelligence (AI), security (Security), Internet of Everything (IoT) and cloud computing (Cloud Computing).
The problems that financial technology needs to break through are: computing, financial-level machine intelligence, trusted digital identity, and digital security and trustworthiness. Blockchain technology will make a great contribution to solving "digital security and credibility".
On the basis of these five technologies working together, the three major financial service functions of "connection", "risk control" and "credit" will be better realized.
According to Sheng Chu, the current technological breakthroughs of Ant Financial’s blockchain are mainly in two aspects: deployment and performance.
In terms of deployment, in the Australia-New Zealand food traceability project, they encountered a practical problem: there was a delay in cross-border deployment nodes. The nodes in Australia and China are 8,000 kilometers apart; and this is an asymmetric deployment, because there are more nodes in China and fewer nodes in Australia, which will lead to "network tilt", and Australia's nodes will become lagging nodes in the network. Ant Financial's blockchain team later successfully solved the technical challenges of 250ms communication delay and network imbalance.
"There are many specific requirements for production-level infrastructure, which cannot be met by doing a small verification in the laboratory." Sheng Chu told "Jiazi Guangnian".
As far as he knows, among the current blockchain traceability teams, many do internal testing, not many do cross-border deployment testing, and there are very few teams with real production-level blockchain deployment experience.
"We are very lucky. We have both resources to invest in technology research and development and corresponding scenarios." Sheng Chu believes that this is the key to technological breakthroughs.
In terms of performance, Ant Financial has achieved 25,000+ TPS (transactions per second) in the actual test of the consensus algorithm. At present, 1000TPS is a common industry bottleneck.
Ant Financial's blockchain team's breakthrough in TPS is also driven by internal scenarios. If the traceability of commodities in the future is to be developed to the stage of "one item, one code", a large number of transactions need to be processed per second.
In the high-frequency payment scenario, taking the Double Eleven in 2017 as an example, the peak number of payments per second of Alipay is 256,000, which requires 256,000 TPS.
In 2018, the Ant Financial blockchain team will focus on the following technical problems in light of scenario requirements:
The first is to strive to realize the large-scale production-level deployment of 100 to 1000 nodes in the actual scenario of the alliance chain. At present, in the industry, the limit of the number of nodes does not exceed 100 without significant performance degradation.
Another direction is privacy-related technologies, seeking a general-purpose privacy protection solution, which is a key technical challenge when exploring financial-level services in the future.
The advantage of Ant Financial’s blockchain team is that there is a good linkage between scenarios and technologies; at the same time, in addition to blockchain technology, the company is also developing cutting-edge technologies such as the Internet of Things and AI. When solving practical problems, future A combination of technologies will be required.
The challenge is to expand new technical directions under the large company system, which puts forward high requirements for the "hand in hand" cooperation ability between technical teams and between technical teams and business teams.
"We value congeniality. We need to have enough curiosity and exploration spirit, and have enthusiasm for technology itself. Those who want to get a quick vote will definitely flow out, and they are not the people we want to do things with." Sheng Chu said.
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Seeing the reality clearly: this is still the "pre-blockchain business period" and there is no shortcut
Comparing the company's blockchain line represented by Ant Financial and community public projects, we can see two paths to shape the future: the former emphasizes improvement and solving existing problems, and is a "reformist"; the latter focuses on technology and incentives. Starting with the mechanism at the same time, emphasizing the transformation of production relations is "revolutionary". The vision of some projects even includes subverting the entire "company system".
As representatives of reformists, Ant Financial and other large companies are more stable and conservative in their attempts, and have less friction with regulatory policies. This is their advantage, and it is also a limitation that they cannot throw off their sleeves and take "wild ways".
But whether it is reform or revolution, facing the old system, both stand in the innovation camp. At this stage, although the innovators have different opinions, the consensus is far greater than the differences: they are actively promoting technological breakthroughs, exploring application scenarios, and using their own methods and concepts to accelerate technology implementation.
Zeng Ming, chief of staff of Alibaba, believes that today is still in the "pre-blockchain business period", and it will take at least two or three years for the outbreak of infrastructure to truly large-scale applications; "Can blockchain challenge BAT?" Yes A wrong question because "it's pointless to think about Facebook in the age of Yahoo" and any disruptive innovations come from marginal breakthroughs.
In other words, most of the projects we have seen now—whether they are high-profile innovation projects or step-by-step giant explorations—may become "cannon fodder" before the big era. Prepare.
Looking back at the development history of Ali and other giants, it is a typical case of marginal breakthroughs: Taobao was a platform for marginal people to purchase marginal products in a niche way in the early days. Alipay was only the choice of a few people at first, and like many current blockchain projects full of loopholes, it is very imperfect. Even until 2009, the experience of fast payment on the PC side was not friendly, and the payment success rate could not exceed 80%.
Only 5 or 6 years ago, the scanning payment solution that we can’t leave today was also an edge technology that was not favored in Ant Financial. After a period of silence, it finally came with the improvement of anti-theft swiping technology and the wide range of smartphones. Popularity re-emerged around 2013 and became a general trend.
Ant Financial, who has experienced all this, should understand this truth best: technology is fair, and every truly brilliant highlight moment must be the moment when all the prerequisites are available at the same time, and it will not work if one link is missing. In the face of blockchain applications, there is also no shortcut.
At the end of 2016, Xipi recorded the information of all participants in the early stage into the No. 0 block when Ant Financial’s first blockchain application, the charity fund tracking application, was officially commercialized.
This is a long list, including the team that participated in the hackathon at the beginning, the product managers who participated when the whole project was still running part-time, etc... This is a list without core executives at the same time. Another "edge breakthrough" story has written an unalterable beginning.
The most attractive part of the blockchain is precisely that, regardless of the ultimate success or failure, the initial edge explorers will always leave their names in the digital world.
appendix:"The World's First Chinese Blockchain Dictionary Released, 50,000 Characters Original"(click to view)
