Chinese giant Alibaba announced that it has extended its blockchain-as-a-service (BaaS) cloud service to all of Southeast Asia, the United States and Europe.
Launched in August, the service has so far only been available in China, but thanks to the experience gained from using it in the public service, logistics and medical industries, the platform is now ready to be used abroad.
The Alibaba Cloud BaaS offers an enterprise-class service and is useful as a tool to create a “secure and stable environment for blockchain implementations”. It is based on Hyperledger Fabric and Ant Blockchain.
Hyperledger Fabric is an implementation of Hyperledger’s blockchain framework, from the Linux Foundation. Ant Blockchain, on the other hand, is a project developed by the fintech company of the Ant Financial group and is a proprietary, patented, high-performance blockchain platform.
Alibaba’s service supports a wide range of applications, including automatic implementation, consortium blockchain management, smart contracts, management of users, certificates and SDKs (Software Development Kit), as well as a range of monitoring, operation and maintenance functions.
Alibaba Cloud has a proven track record of multi-scenario blockchain applications since 2017, for example in public benefit management, logistics and medical industries, based on decentralized and distributed storage capabilities.
Alibaba Cloud Blockchain Service’s Senior Staff Engineer and Lead, Yi Li, said: “We proud ourselves to be the trust infrastructure for business which empowers many innovations across all industries. Our customers in China have already experienced the benefits from our BaaS platform and we are excited to extend this service to other enterprise customers all over the world. Alibaba Cloud is also the first blockchain service provider of Intel SGX security technology. We aim to become a technology partner that enables companies that wish to use blockchain to accelerate their digital transformation”.
Hyperledger Executive Director Brian Behlendorf added: “We’re delighted to see the launch of Alibaba Cloud BaaS powered by Hyperledger Fabric as we’ve already seen many Hyperledger use cases in production this year. As stated in MIIT’s recent whitepaper, 2018 is set to be another blockbuster year for the industry with record amount of capital to be injected into companies in the space, and Hyperledger is committed to the development of blockchain technologies in China”.
