September 28, the Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba launches the official website of its R&D arm Damo Academy. Since then, the 5 research areas and 14 laboratories of Alibaba Damo Academy have exposed to the public.

According to the official website, there are three laboratories under its Financial research branch, including intelligence finance, blockchain and biometrics labs. A lot of financial industry experts and top scientists have participated in its research team, and they have set up offices in Hangzhou, Beijing, Seattle, Silicon Valley, and New York.

It was reported that Gordon Zhang, the head of blockchain department of Ant Financial, is appointed to the head of the blockchain laboratory.

According to the official description, the Alibaba Damo finance technology is committed to improving the security, accuracy and convenience in finance sector, improving financial forecast and decision-making ability, and remodeling the financial service. This institution is aiming to solve future problems with innovative technologies and trying to bring more equal opportunities to the world.

While the blockchain Lab is committed to the research and application of the blockchain technology in commercial and applications. Their research will focus on consensus protocols, cryptography security, cross-chain agreement and other technologies in the blockchain field. The blockchain lab is also a leader in developing proprietary industrial- and financial-grade blockchain systems.

The products and application page of blockchain lab demonstrated four major application scenarios, including commodity provenance, mutual insurance, charity, property leasing.

The Damo blockchain lab also lists 7 research focus includes the consensus protocols; cryptographic security and privacy protection; blockchain technology combined with trusted execution environment; cross-chain protocol; smart contract syntax and security analysis; blockchain and IoT; as well as combining blockchain technology with secure multi-party computation (SMC).

Jack Ma, founder of Alibaba also unveiled his three vision for Damo Academy:

1. It must outlive Alibaba;
2. Serving at least 2 billion people worldwide;
3. He hopes this institute could be future-oriented and use technology to solve the challenges of the future.