Chinese fintech Ant Group — which is now poised to launch what could be the world’s largest initial public offering — has announced a new platform via its blockchain business. Ant Group spun out from e-commerce giant Alibaba and is the parent company of China’s largest digital payments service Alipay. Ant Group’s blockchain business, AntChain, has today rolled out a new digital copyright services platform. It combines blockchain technology with AI to enable creators to securely authenticate and verify all kinds of original content — whether video, image-based or written material. The platform generates a unique, tamper-proof digital copyright certification …

Frederik Gregaard, the incoming CEO of the Cardano Foundation, shared with Cointelegraph his perspective on fintech's competitive landscape and major technology trends. Discussing competition, Gregaard said that the protocol's biggest opponents do not come from within the blockchain space: “I think the biggest competitor, it's really the largest technology companies today around, the large tech platforms such as Google, Amazon, Tencent, Alibaba, those kind of players”. Gregaard believes that social-media-based big technology providers have morphed from supplying their customers with meaningful tools to essentially owning and manipulating their users. He went so far as to call them “an addictive, mental, …

Despite Chinese firm Alibaba filing the most patents so far this year, the United States still takes the lead as the country with the most blockchain patents, a Sept. 17 report from intellectual property consultancy KISSPatent said. IBM and Alibaba hold the most blockchain patents. Alibaba has filed more than 200 patents while IBM filed a little over 100. But other U.S.-based companies like Bank of America and Mastercard have also filed several patent applications bumping up the total for the U.S. According to KISSPatent, more blockchain patents have been filed in the first half of 2020 than all of …

Ant Group, the financial affiliate of China’s e-commerce giant Alibaba, has filed an Initial Public Offering, or IPO, in Hong Kong and Shanghai. Created by Alibaba co-founder Jack Ma, Ant Group is targeting a valuation of about $226 billion, based on a target IPO raise of nearly $30 billion, people familiar with the matter told Bloomberg on Aug. 25. As reported, the new IPO could become the largest deal in history, potentially overtaking the record set by Saudi Arabian multinational oil and gas giant, Saudi Aramco — which raised around $29.4B earlier this year. According to Bloomberg data, the target …

The People’s Bank of China is purportedly planning to use its digital currency electronic system (DCEP) — another moniker for its central bank digital currency — to target the dominance of technology giants like Alibaba and Tencent in the digital payments sector. The report comes only a few days after claims of the central bank prompting a top antitrust agency to launch a probe against Alipay and WeChat Pay for using their dominance to suppress competition. According to the Financial Times, even regulators and executives of Alibaba’s financial group Ant agreed that PBoC will target the market dominance of Alipay …

Days after the CEOs of the world’s top tech firms faced antitrust hearings in the United States Congress, sources are alleging that Beijing too could soon probe its own digital monopolies. A Reuters report published on July 31 cites anonymous sources who claim the People’s Bank of China has formally recommended that the State Council’s antitrust committee launch a probe into the activities of digital payments titans Alipay and WeChat Pay. The central bank has allegedly argued that both have used their ascendant position to stifle any possible competition in the field of digital payments. If approved, an antitrust probe …

The payments subsidiary of the Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba, Ant Group, today launched a new blockchain solution dubbed AntChain. According to a report published on South China Morning Post, AntChain is built on top of Ant Group’s blockchain technology combining artificial intelligence, Internet of Things (IoT), secure computation and other technologies. As part of the AntChain initiative, the Ant Group has built a new workstation similar in size to a laptop. It comes with built-in software and hardware accelerator meant to smoothen the functioning of blockchain applications. AntChain’s workstation can reportedly reduce the set-up time to one-tenth of the usual …

China’s biggest port operator, China Merchants Port, reached a deal on May 28 with the e-commerce giant, Alibaba Group, and its affiliate, Ant Financial. This deal will allow for the development of a blockchain-based platform, which will target a number of different use cases. According to local media, the platform will allow buyers, sellers, logistic companies, banks, customs, and tax officials to conduct contactless digital export and import transactions. The companies will promote an in-depth integration of blockchain technology in the port industry. Their goal is to become the world’s first blockchain-based digital port with an open collaboration network. Implementing …

Alibaba co-founder Jack Ma is stepping down from the board of Japanese tech giant and major blockchain backer SoftBank. After 13 years of close involvement with SoftBank, China’s richest man leaves the board amid SoftBank posting its worst operating losses in its history. According to a May 17 report by Japanese publication Nikkei, Ma’s departure announcement amid Softbank’s Vision Fund reporting record-breaking losses of 1.8 trillion yen ($16.7 billion). Softbank’s total annual losses accounted for 1.36 trillion yen ($12.7 billion) for the year ending March 31, the company reported. China’s richest man to leave Softbank’s board on June 25 Announcing …

Blockchain platform Ontology announced a partnership with social creator platform OGQ to use the Ontology blockchain to ensure copyright protection for content created through the platform. OGQ allows users to upload and sell unique digital content including emojis, memes, fonts, music, and videos. The partnership will see 250 million instances of digital content being uploaded to the Ontology blockchain. Ontology partners with social creators on copyright Since launching in 2011, OGQ has attracted 14 million creators who have uploaded 54 million pieces of digital content to the platform. Digital assets uploaded to the blockchain will also be purchasable in exchange …

China’s Office of the Central Cyberspace Affairs Commission (OCCAC) has announced its third round of blockchain projects to receive approval from the country's regulators. 224 distributed ledger technology (DLT) ventures have been added to the commission’s registry, which includes major tech firms Alibaba, Baidu and China Mobile. The news appears to have been broken by Twitter user ‘AliceolaCrypto’, who posted a screenshot of the OCCAC’s announcement on April 27. She wrote that of the 224 approved projects, approximately 40% hail from Beijing. Roughly one-quarter of projects will target the fintech sector. The list of approved projects includes ventures from several …

Ant Financial — the Chinese fintech company formerly known as Alipay— has launched a new consortium blockchain platform called OpenChain. According to an announcement on April 16, the platform would allow developers and small and micro enterprises to utilize innovative blockchain tools. They can now explore the technology further and develop better applications and smart contracts on the blockchain. Ant Financial’s General Manager, Jin Ge, claims that the launch of OpenChain will boost the efforts of almost one million SMEs and developers over the next three years. Pushing blockchain beyond tech and financial giants According to the release, SMEs and …