Ant Group, the owner of China’s iconic Alipay mobile payment app, unveiled a blockchain-powered cross-border trade settlement platform to improve its catalog of technology products before its blockbuster IPO.
According to the reports, Ant aims to raise about $35 billion in a dual IPO based on a higher valuation of about $250 billion or more after assessing early investor interest.
The new platform of the firm “Trusple” is based on its blockchain technology Antchain. The name Trusle was derived from the statement “trust made simple”.
Guofei Jiang, President Ant Group’s Advanced Technology Business Group said, “Trusple was designed to solve problems for SMEs and financial institutions involved in cross-border trading.”
To ‘help improve cross-border processes’, Trusple has collaborated with leading international companies such as BNP Paribas, Citibank, Dutch Bank and Standard Chartered.
If Trusple is able to accomplish its aim and streamline international trade between SMEs in the back-end supply chain and payment processing services, both traders and financial institutions could benefit from cost advantages.
Ant stated that buyers and sellers can upload trading orders to the platform, which creates information like logistics into a smart contract automatically while the bank of both buyer and seller can settle their payment through Antchain.
According to the patent database IncoPat, over the past two years, Ant has submitted the largest number of blockchain patent applications worldwide.
Technology, the digital ledger that will become the backbone of many cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, has been gaining interest in China since the end of 2019 when President Xi Jinping said the country should accelerate its development.
Ant Group
Known as Ant Financial, Ant Group had to rename itself because of the strict financial constraints and to establish it as a technology business rather than a provider of financial technology.
