8 July Shanghai– “The 5th Financial Technology Summit” was held in Shanghai on July 7-8, 2018. Jiang Guofei, VP of Ant Financial, delivered a speech and explained the attitude of Ant Financial on blockchain development. He mentioned “3 dos and 3 don’ts”.

Jiang Guofei:

Hello, everyone, thank you very much for organizing the discussion on the value of the blockchain. Since the beginning of this year, blockchain has been very hot topic in the industry. One engineer in our team tagged himself as “blockchain engineer” on the dating website and received many girls’ love letters. This is a side note on the popularity of blockchain.

It’s not clear to see how blockchain has gained such a popularity. Personally, I think there are several reasons. First, it involves technologies such as cryptography. It also introduces incentives, which involve the flow of value on blockchain and therefore economy is involved. At the same time, if you want to apply blockchain in many industries, business logic in many industries has to be sorted out. It will make the picture much more complicated.

A few guests just shared their vision. Ant Financial has always been an active participant in blockchain technology and application. We started to do research and development in this area very earli. I realized the value of the blockchain long time ago and set up “3 dos and 3 don’t’s” for our team.

“3 dos”: First, we should find out solutions that solve practical problems and have social value. If a problem is solved without fundamental social value and no lasting vitality, there will be no commercial value. Second, we want to achieve breakthrough in terms of large-scale commercial application, so we are doing a lot of work in this area. The third is that as a blockchain network, openness is essential in the ecology.

“3 don’ts”: First, we don’t make bubble coins. There are many ways of incentives and recording on blockchain. How is the value anchored and generated?
Second, we don’t go against regulation. We still want to be able to comply with regulations, embrace them and do what we should do.
Third, we don’t breach user privacy. We hope not to invade user privacy, through the privacy model, data isolation, including the account privacy model to ensure the user’s data are protected. Following these principles, we start from ground up, digging into thte bottom layer technology, including cryptography, storage efficiency, then to the platform level, cross-chain protocols, etc.
One year later, we suddenly discovered that our patent is NO.1 in the global IoT enterprise. The achievement is not because we are pursuing this thing, but because we have done a lot of research and development. We have also implemented a lot of business scenarios. The public welfare platform with 200 million users have been running on the blockchain netowork. Oversea product traceability on Tmall has been acknowledged by the public. Products with traceability attributes enjoy better sales than others because consumers care about where the milk powder comes from and how fresh they are. In urban are, we also see a lot of blockchain applications, including the introduction of rental applications in Xiong’an to ensure your rights.

Recently, we have just launched a cross-border remittance from Hong Kong to the Philippines. Just like domestic remittances, users can enjoy fast services in minutes. It used to take takes several days, or dozens of minutes to make international remittance. We can do it in 3 seconds. If you put in a number in Hong Kong’s wallet, the receiver could receive money in Philippine currency. It’s an instant currency swap. These technologies are changing lives and making them more effective. From that perspective, I think the value of the blockchain is obvious and clear. But blockchain is not application in all industries.
What we have to do is to achieve solid breakthrough in technology while solving fundamental social problems and improving social efficiency.