Blockchain is currently the most hyped technology on the Internet. Even after the digital currency downturn and ICO was explicitly banned by the regulatory authorities at the beginning of this year, the technology’s landing was questioned, but the fire of blockchain is still in the air.
As we all know, after virtual currency is limited, many blockchain players are thinking about how to implement blockchain technology. It is not uncommon to grab the wind and blow the landing stunt, but after these “pseudo-blockchain enterprises” in the name of blockchain collect money, people are uneasy about the landing of blockchain technology. However, it is precisely because of the emergence of the blockchain bubble that the real blockchain technology enterprises have more time to settle and prepare for the real landing of the blockchain.
Compared with the small fish fighting the storm, Internet giants have enough technology research and development resources as support, and will not be too impatient in the heat wave of blockchain. In addition, the business coverage of giant enterprises is wide, and the implementation of blockchain technology will be more selective. In many fields, the financial field has become the field of technology landing for many giants.
In the era of science and technology finance, Internet finance has undoubtedly become the era of science and technology finance 1.0. After the short-lived smart finance, blockchain finance has been endowed with the era of science and technology finance 2.0.
In the Fintech 1.0 era, Internet finance was full of rust
The birth of Internet finance does not date back to the beginning of the birth of the Internet, but after the highly mature Internet technology, financial enterprises organically combine with Internet technology enterprises to realize capital financing, payment, investment and information intermediary services.
The birth of Internet finance gives financial enterprises a new opportunity to expand online channels, and also provides Internet enterprises with market resources for their financial business development. Among numerous Internet financial enterprises, P2P credit has become the most common platform type. There were various Internet niche lending platforms, such as Tencent Microcredit, Ali Debi, jingdong Baitiao, etc., and all kinds of Internet niche lending platforms from small to vertical segmentation. At that time, Internet finance enjoyed unlimited prosperity.
But as the number of players of online finance companies continues to increase, the industry’s regulatory efforts cannot keep pace with the growth rate of P2P lending platforms. In the market environment with insufficient or no supervision, many Internet financial platforms have gradually pushed the cash loan business from the “gray zone” to the “black zone”. Campus loan problems continue to erupt, Money Bobo, Ezubao and other P2P gimmicky Ponzi scheme was revealed…
With the continuous emergence of the chaos of Internet finance, industry supervision policies are also gradually improved. After the strengthening of supervision, various enterprises in the Internet financial market have entered the rectification stage. In this stage of Internet financial regulation, the voice of blockchain technology landing in the financial field is rising, which is due to the excellent performance of blockchain in supervision and regulation.
On the one hand, the decentralized mechanism of blockchain can effectively reduce the chaos of cash loans caused by the centralization of P2P platforms in the field of Internet finance. When the database accumulated by the central platform in the market reaches a certain market value, it is easy for the database to be stolen or the central platform to sell user data. The outbreak of the naked loan event is not only because of the problems in the business of the platform, but more importantly, the failure of the centralized platform to provide corresponding guarantee for the security of users’ private information.
On the other hand, consensus mechanism solves the problem of low regulation efficiency in Internet finance industry. Although compared with the traditional banking business, the Internet financial enterprises on the regulation efficiency obtained the very big promotion, but along with the ascension of the national spending power, Internet banking business on regulation cannot satisfy diversified financial consumer demand, and users in each financial business cannot realize cross-platform integration platform, user control of cash rate is reduced greatly. However, in blockchain finance, data and users of different platforms or financial products can be packaged and uploaded in their respective nodes, and then shared to the whole blockchain by super nodes. Users can effectively regulate the financial business of different platforms on the blockchain.
The loopholes in the supervision ability of Internet finance are becoming more and more obvious, and the relevant departments are increasing their supervision. The hot blockchain enters the market at this time, which solves the regulatory problem of Internet finance and will usher in the first spring of blockchain finance.
The voice of blockchain technology landing in the financial field is increasingly rising, which also makes the layout pattern of the three Internet giants BAT in blockchain finance gradually emerge. The typical representative of blockchain finance in Tencent system is Webank, while Alibaba is Ant Financial, while Baidu conducts layout on baidu Finance after splitting. Giants are unknown when blockchain is in the hot air, but in the wave of landing finance, the gunpowder in the field of blockchain finance is more intense. The three giants of each side make the small and medium-sized enterprises in the financial field face the problem of “alliance” or “taking sides”.
Tencent: “substitute” Webank and its arbitration chain
In February this year, Webank and Guangzhou Arbitration Commission issued the industry’s first “arbitration chain” award, declaring that Tencent won the first battle in the blockchain application war. In fact, Tencent has set up a blockchain team as early as 2015. Through continuous research and development and exploration, it has built the BAAS platform (blockchain as a service) to provide services for blockchain developers, and at the same time, blockchain technology is applied in micro gold, supply finance, process search and other fields.
Webank, known as the “replacement” of P2P platform, is also the representative of Tencent Finance. As early as 2016, webank jointly launched the financial blockchain alliance with ping An Bank, China Merchants Network, JINGdong Finance and other 25 financial institutions, and established golden Chain Alliance.
Within The Golden Chain Alliance, Webank and financial institutions can conduct fair and just financial business transactions, provide data analysis of institutions within the Golden Chain alliance to the regulatory authorities, and use the distributed algorithm of blockchain to improve the efficiency of the supervision and audit of the regulatory authorities. Up to now, the member institutions of Golden Chain alliance have covered six categories of financial industries such as banking, fund, securities and insurance, with more than 90 institutions covering 24 cities in China, including many financial institutions in Hong Kong. After obtaining favorable market resources in the development of Golden Chain Alliance for two years, WeBank’s financial performance is also very conspicuous. In 2017, WeBank’s revenue reached 6.748 billion yuan, with a year-on-year increase of 175.54%. Net profit surged 261.1% to 1.448 billion yuan.
The arbitration chain is based on the characteristics of decentralization, tamper-proof and trust sharing of the blockchain. The evidence chain can only be established through encryption algorithm and distributed storage to guarantee the fairness, authenticity and security of each enterprise platform in the alliance chain. When enterprises in the alliance chain need arbitration services, the executor only needs to press a button, and the arbitration results with real and legal data basis can be automatically generated on the arbitration platform.
Ali: The spark between Ant Financial’s “Giant Elephant” and blockchain
On June 8, Ant Financial announced that it had completed a huge financing of $140. Its market value of nearly one trillion yuan makes it a worthy giant in the financial field. And the $14 billion financing, as ant Financial in the block chain, artificial intelligence and other technical layout of the capital guarantee.
In fact, Ant Financial has long been engaged in the development and application research of blockchain. During the two years from 2015 to 2017, Ant Financial has successively acquired shares or acquired many foreign financial service enterprises to continuously strengthen Alibaba’s advantages in the payment field. Last year, Alibaba set up Dharma Academy, and said it would invest 100 billion yuan in the next five years as the start-up capital, which further shows alibaba’s determination to build a technical team. According to economic Observer, a number of the world’s top technology companies will launch the MIT Fintech Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the United States on July 18 to study the development and application of blockchain. Ant Financial is the only Chinese company on the list of participants.
The technical team has sufficient financial support, and the payment field has a strong layout network. Ant Financial’s implementation of blockchain technology, traceability to food safety, guarantee of genuine goods, and successful cases in various public welfare activities are also coming. For example, alipay’s public welfare project allows users to use ant forests to collect energy and plant saplings in areas with serious desertification. At the same time, you can also collect love through ant Manor and donate it to public welfare projects. Whether it is Ant Forest or Ant Manor, the details of each donation will be recorded on the blockchain, making the funds transparent and traceable. In addition, Alibaba is also trying to apply blockchain technology to the alliance chain’s digital bill system.
Baidu: We want to use blockchain finance to subsidize the loss of dividends in the era of Internet finance
In the era of Internet finance, Baidu has put most of its energy into the field of artificial intelligence, which has led to the saying of “Baidu All in AI”. Therefore, Baidu has missed the best dividend period of Internet finance. After that, although blockchain finance was not fully developed in the field of AI finance, blockchain and ARTIFICIAL intelligence technology have many points of integration, so baidu Finance, which missed the bonus period of Internet finance, ushered in a new turning point.
In terms of layout speed, Baidu, as a technology-based enterprise, has more abundant technical team resources than Tencent and Ali, so it is more cautious in acquiring market resources. It only invested in Circle, a global payment company based on blockchain technology, in June 2016. But in the second half of last year, Baidu stepped up its blockchain adoption. Baidu Finance can not only use the data sharing of blockchain technology to provide the data foundation for artificial intelligence technology, but also strengthen the efficiency of blockchain smart contract and distributed storage through artificial intelligence technology. The dual ecosystem of blockchain and AI has enabled Baidu Finance to rise rapidly, and the blockchain has come into being.
At the same time, Baidu launched a blockchain pet dog named “Laiqi Dog” this year to promote Baidu’s blockchain technology and various software. And in time after the heat of the dog went away, baidu has recently launched a first block chain native applications “universe”, both for the user to create a scenario of the digital universe, also make up for the deficiency existing in baidu on the third party application products, and through the open baidu mobile assistant attract more compliance blocks to build DAPP ecological chain applications.
On the whole, giants have spent a long time polishing and precipitation on blockchain technology when they landed blockchain in the financial field, and constantly seek Allies in the market. However, from the essence of the financial industry, the financial service field includes the financial system, capital system, and the clearing and settlement system of financial business. It is a three-dimensional network, and it will be very difficult to map to the two-dimensional block chain.
Moreover, from the perspective of the current market competition pattern, the giants in the financial blockchain field are still at the stage of fighting for themselves. In fact, the blockchain alliance can only be regarded as a “team” alliance of various financial enterprises and Internet technology enterprises, or even a centralized super node in the whole future blockchain field. Nodes cannot realize data sharing and cross-platform management of their own data, so it is impossible to provide efficient supervision services for link people.
conclusion
To sum up, currently on the market and is not a genuine chain finance the block chain alliance, mutual restriction still exist between each block, has yet to realize data sharing, its super nodes within each block due to exercise right, this also can only calculate going up is conducted under the chain block Internet giant from competition, And the giant’s market resources led to the majority of small and medium-sized enterprises have to take sides. However, from the essence of the market, the market resources owned by the giants should also be upgraded to meet the needs of users. Therefore, when will blockchain really hit the ground in the financial field? Perhaps the answer to this question is when the giants reach a consensus, which is when the blockchain hits the ground?
Article/Liu Kuang public account, ID: Liukuang110