Ant Group, a leading provider of financial services technology, and the parent company of China’s largest mobile payments business Alipay, today officially launched AntChain, a new technology brand for the company’s blockchain-based solutions that also aggregates other digital technologies including AI, Internet of Things (IoT) and secure computation.

“Since our inception, building trust has been core to our offer to customers,”

said Eric Jing, Executive Chairman, Ant Group.

“We believe in blockchain’s potential to redefine trust in the digital age, and in solving real-life problems for our customers.”

Since 2015, Ant Group has been investing significantly in the research and development of blockchain technologies to strengthen transparency and build trust in industries that traditionally involve large numbers of participants and complex processes. Ant Group now has the largest productivity blockchain platform in China, with the ability to process and support one billion user accounts and one billion transactions every day. Currently, over 100 million digital assets are uploaded onto AntChain on average every day.

“With the launch of the AntChain brand, we look forward to contributing to the acceleration of blockchain-enabled industry transformations, and to working with our partners to make blockchain technology more accessible for users, as well as creating tangible value for SMEs, consumers and clients across a spectrum of industries.”

Said Geoff Jiang, Vice President of Ant Group.

Ant Group also unveiled AntChain Station, an all-in-one workstation that reduces the deployment time of the company’s blockchain-based solutions by as much as 90%. This enables enterprise clients to set up AntChain within an hour, which is significantly lower than the previous average set-up time of 10 hours.

AntChain Station, which is approximately the size of a laptop, is designed to accelerate the deployment of AntChain’s applications, with hardware encryption acceleration for privacy-preserving computation and enhanced security algorithms. With AntChain Station, enterprise clients can rapidly deploy and use blockchain technologies.

Previously, deploying AntChain involves installing a set of software and preparing the computation environment on general-purpose hardware. The new AntChain Station offers users an easy-to-use integrated alternative, combining built-in software and a dedicated hardware accelerator that is expected to reduce deployment time by 90% and increase transaction speed by 30%.

On the same day, Ant Group also signed a strategic agreement with Dell, Hewlett-Packard and Lenovo to make IT leasing services more accessible for SMEs through the use of AntChain. Earlier in May, Ant Group formed a similar partnership with Intel.

Featured image: Eric Jing, Executive Chairman of Ant Group, at the AntChain launch event (Photo: Business Wire)