Alibaba’s Ant Financial Joins Quest for Transparency in Charitable Transactions

By August 2, 2016Bitcoin Business

In February, Bitcoin Magazine reported that Alipay, an online payment platform of the Chinese e-commerce corporation Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., had announced a project based on blockchain technology and cloud services. The announcement indicated the growing interest of Alibaba in distributed ledger technology.

Now, it appears that the Chinese giant is gradually committing to the blockchain. Ant Financial, the Alibaba company that operates Alipay, is using distributed ledgers to transparently record transactions and improve the accountability of Chinese philanthropic organizations, Bloomberg Technology reports .

Ant Financial dominates the online payments market in China through its Alipay service, which has more than 450 million annual active users and has been compared to PayPal. Credit Suisse estimates that that 58 percent of China’s online payment transactions go through Alipay. The company also operates a money-market fund called Yu’e Bao and an online bank called MYbank.The name Ant refers to the small merchants — myriads of hardworking ants — who sell goods through Alibaba, The Wall Street Journal explains .

Ant Financial was spun off as a stand-alone company before the $25 billion Alibaba initial public offering in 2014 and is expected to launch its own IPO. The company completed a new $4.5 billion funding round in April as reported by The Financial Times , giving it a valuation of roughly $60 billion, according to China Business News, a respected daily newspaper that is part-owned by Alibaba. The new investors include high-profile state-owned Chinese corporations such as a unit of China Investment Corp. (CIC), the country’s sovereign wealth fund and a subsidiary of China Construction Bank, the country’s second-largest lender by assets.

“We hope to bring more transparency to charity and blockchain technology’s decentralized nature fits that purpose well,” said Ant Financial CTO Cheng Li. “It means that all the information and transaction history of funds […]

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