Ant Financial’s online payment processor Alipay announced the future launch of a remittance service based on its own blockchain. The cross-border payments platform is primarily intended to process transactions from the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region to the Philippines.
According to Ant Financial’s official website, this Alibaba subsidiary company bets on Distributed Accounting Technology (DAT) to allow Alipay users to send and receive transactions in real time.
At the moment there are no details on the characteristics of the blockchain that will be developed to support the transactions, as no technical details were disclosed in the press release published today by the company. However, it was announced that the initiative has Standard Chartered Bank as its banking business partner and the GCash digital wallet as its Philippine partner.
Alipay, a subsidiary of Alibaba Group, to launch a cross-border payments platform based in blockchain technology
It is important to note that Alipay is led by Jack Ma, the founder and CEO of the Alibaba Group, who stated during the announcement that the position of the three mentioned companies with respect to DLT is favorable, even considering that “it could change the world more than people think”, according to Bloomberg.
However, the story is different when mentioning cryptocurrencies, as for Jack Ma “Bitcoin (BTC) may be a bubble.”
The blockchain is common among the significant figures of the global financial ecosystem, and both Ma and some influential Wall Street figures have been researching and testing distributed accounting technologies for a couple of years now. This position has been criticised by members of the Bitcoin (BTC) ecosystem, as sometimes these appear to be maneuvers to conduct market manipulation.
In the particular case of Alibaba Group, this was one of the first Asian companies to adopt blockchain technology to ensure the origin of the food offered on the Alibaba website. Also, other subsidiaries linked to Alibaba and Ant Financial, such as TMall, an electronic payment platform such as Alipay, have adopted blockchain to optimize their operations.
