From 8 to 9 November, the World Blockchain Conference was successfully held in Wuzhen, the venue of the World Internet Summit. The summit is themed “Limitless Applications” with sessions including the opening ceremony. More than a hundred scholars, innovators, experts, gurus and opinion leaders from the fields of blockchain, digital assets, AI, and 5G gathered.

Speaking at the World Blockchain Summit in Wuzhen, China on Friday, Tencent blockchain chief Yige Cai said the company’s virtual bank received the SFC’s green-light. Moving forward, the company will assemble a team to support the blockchain-based banking platform, according to China’s leading blockchain news media 8btc.

“The Hong Kong government has begun to pay enough attention to digital asset trading, it is good for the whole industry. Of course, if you want to take this license, you must do a lot of standardized actions.”

Said Cai, on October 6, Hong Kong’s Securities and Futures Commission (SFC) released a set of guidelines to pave the way for the issuance of operating licenses to cryptocurrency exchanges based in the city.

Under the new framework, announced at Hong Kong Fintech Week, platform operators that offer trading in virtual assets classified as securities may seek Type 1 and Type 7 licenses from the SFC. The SFC has granted virtual bank licences to 12 entities so far. On the list is Infinium Limited, a joint venture between Tencent, Industrial and Commerce Bank of China (ICBC) and other two Hong Kong-based institutional investors.

Tencent started the blockchain research at the end of 2015. After the white paper of Tencent blockchain scheme was released in April 2017, Tencent entered the application exploration stage of the whole scenario. Up to now, Tencent have also made some projects that are valuable and influential.

“Tencent already has practices in digital asset for supply chain finance and improving the efficiency of asset and capital allocation, such as cooperation with McDonald’s in supply chain finance and Tencent’s self-developed blockchain electronic invoice.”

Cai believes that the blockchain is still in the early stage of application emerging. In the process of large-scale application implementation, the blockchain itself is not a bottleneck anymore, while the gateway and auxiliary technology from off-chain to the on-chain are the key, which requires integration with the Internet of things, artificial intelligence.

Cai thinks a lot of domestic banks’ businesses have already surpassed commercial banks overseas. Digital banks in the future will integrate CeFi + DeFi. With the emergence of legal digital currency (such as Libra), Cai think it will help a lot of assets to speed up the digitalization, which is good news for digital banks.