PPDai Group is a Chinese peer-to-peer (P2P) lending platform. It made its market debut on the New York Stock Exchange in November 2017 and becomes the first China-based online P2P lending platform listed in the US market.

Yesterday, PPDai Group announced that they were planning to establish a blockchain research institute, which caused its stock surge: PPDAI Group Inc stock rose over 18% in pre-market trading.

On January 18, Shanghai Paipaidai Financial Information Service Co., Ltd. (PPDai, NYSE: PPDF) has successfully held the “Smart Finance Research Institute Summit 2018” in Shanghai. Zhang Jun, the co-founder and chief executive of PPDai, opened the conference by saying “Finance is accessible”. He also emphasized that PPDai is a fintech enterprise which based on the concept of inclusive financial system.

Zhang Jun pointed out that PPDai’s business strategy will continue based on the technology and data-driven traditions and the company is going to invest 1 billion yuan ($156 million) in the new PPDai Smart Finance Institute. The new institute will be composed of 4 major sectors: artificial intelligence, blockchain, financial cloud and big data sectors and the whole thing will be set up within the next 3 years.

In addition, the Smart Finance Institute is also actively developing its global leading technologies. They formed an impressive consultant team consisting of executives technology experts and researchers from overseas. The announced name list includes Joseph Milana, the former chief scientist from FICO; Yaser Mostafa, professor of electrical engineering and computer science at Caltech, Yaser is also the author of the best-selling machine-learning book “Learning From Data”; Athanassios Siapas, professor of computing and neural networks at Caltech and many other top scientists in AI area. PPDai also seeking cooperation with research institutes under the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, Zhejiang University and the National University of Singapore.

Zhang Jun said:” the new research center is built up not only for optimizing and developing more intelligent and secure online finance services, but also aims for regulatory related purpose.”

This month, Two major exchanges in China, the Shanghai and Shenzhen stock exchanges warning that, companies using “blockchain” concept to mislead investors in order to get sharp gains in their share prices would result in disciplinary measures. However, to those companies actually doing research on blockchian, they are making themselves more and more competitive.