China’s Google - Baidu - Launches Its Own Blockchain As-A-Service Platform

Often known as China’s Google and the country’s largest search engine ‘Baidu’ has recently launched Blockchain as a service platform (BaaS) known an Baidu Trust. As per Baidu Financial, BaaS has been operational since July 21, 2017. Baidu claims that its BaaS technology has already been applied to asset security and exchange, and also claims that it has contributed to the "first asset-backed securities exchange products using blockchain technology in China."

The technology developed by Baidu is an open platform which the company says would provide the most “user friendly” blockchain service. As stated on the company’s website, Baidu Trust allows for conducting and tracing transactions and is very customizable to be applied to multiple other use cases like digital billing, digital currency, insurance management financial auditing, bank credit management and much more.

The website also describes this as “self-developed project” that can be used for “Efficient and low cost traceability and trading, ideal for digital currency, payment and settlement, digital ticketing, bank credit management, equity proof and exchange-traded securities, insurance management, financial auditing and more”.

Baidu is also said to have explored the utility of blockchain technology in other fields like distributed computing, IoT, AI and unmanned vehicles.

The search giant has also been exploring the blockchain technology’s FinTech applications in 2015. Last year, the company’s subsidiary Baidu Financial also joined the Hyperledger project that explores a variety of distributed ledger technology use cases.

Earlier, in October 2013, the company also announced for accepting Bitcoin payments for its Jiasule services which looks after improving the website’s performance in terms of speed, performance and security.

However, Baidu is not the first Chinese firm to launch its own blockchain open platform. Chinese Internet Conglomerate Tencent has already launched its own suite of blockchain services. Guo Rui, Tencent’s Vice President of Payment Platform and Financial Applications in a forum in Chengdu in November 2017 said: “We independently developed a complete set of bottom-layer blockchain protocols and actively participated in the formulation of credible blockchain standards for China Institute of Information and Communications.”

Another Chinese giant and even a global conglomerate Alibaba has used the blockchain technology across its multiple services and platform. Last month, while talking to CNBC, Alibaba co-founder Jack Ma said “We have a team specifically to study that. We’ve spent a lot of efforts on blockchain technology at Alibaba.”