More than 1,500 blockchain and cryptocurrency enthusiasts flooded into the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco last Friday, attending the Blockchain Connect Conference which was dubbed as the first US-China blockchain conference.

Aaron Cai (also known as Cai Yige), the general manager of Tencent Blockchain gave a key-note speech on the Chinese internet conglomerate’s blockchain development progress and its various use cases at the one-day conference.

Aaron Cai 

According to Cai’s presentation, Tencent is without doubt on the radar in terms of blockchain innovation. The firm tapped into blockchain research as early as 2016, and published a white paper on Blockchain Solution last April. In late 2017, Tencent blockchain passed the credible blockchain evaluation of China’s ICT institute and launched a BaaS(blockchain as a service) open platform which could providing users with a more complete and convenient blockchain development and operational experience.

Aaron Cai said Tencent blockchain has been applied in multiple areas, including finance, philanthropy, legal affairs and logistics.

He cited a use case in the field of supply chain. The current supply chain finance system faces a thorny problem, that is, as capital tends to flow into tier-1 suppliers first, tier 2 and 3 suppliers find it difficult to raise funds. In addition, asymmetric information which is common in supply chain systems would easily lead to lower confidence in the transactions between core enterprises and suppliers.Therefore, Tencent blockchain has doubled its efforts to deal with such ‘pain points’ in the industry.

Technically, Tencent blockchain platform has two major innovations:

First, Tencent blockchain has more than 20 patented technologies.Compared with most of China’s open source systems which were built through cooperation with many domestic and foreign players, Tencent blockchain relies on its indigenously-built technology to create a built-in smart contract.This built-in smart contracts helps traditional business model to migrate to blockchain in a more secure, efficient and user-friendly way.

Second, its deployment is based on database and SQL support, which means developers can stick to their previous development habits.

As for the firm’s expansion strategy, Cai asserted that Tencent blockchain which advocates open and sharing, acts as a value link between enterprices. ” We welcome traditional service providers in all scenarios to establish service systems with Tencent in their respective industries,to reach a win-win situation.”

China’s three most important internet titans, Baidu, Tencent, and Alibaba—known collectively as BAT—has all aggressively pushed blockchain’s commercial applications, leading the rapid development of China’s blockchain ecosystem.