Alliance Chain To Accelerate Landing "Arms Race" And Challenges

Since the advent of bitcoin in 2009, block chain technology has been applied for 10 years. Of course, the role of block chain is not only reflected in the Token terminal, but also the core technology of digitalization. The journey of block chain is to serve all walks of life.

In recent years, with the evolution of block chain technology, domestic policy dividends have been frequent. As early as 2016, the "13th Five-Year" National Informatization Plan issued by the State Council put the block chain into it. This year, there are continuous support from the central level and local governments.

A new upsurge of research on block chain has been launched again in China. Block chaining, from terminology explanation, is a decentralized accounting and distributed storage database with centralization, which has the characteristics of centralization, tampering, and traceability. According to access and management authority, block chain can be divided into three categories, one is public chain, two is private chain, and three is alliance chain.

Among them, the alliance chain is the most widely distributed type of domestic enterprises.

In contrast, the public chain refers to the fact that anyone in the world can read, send information or transactions, and information or transactions can be effectively recognized, and can also participate in the "common process block chain". The core application of the public chain is digital money, including bitcoins.

However, the public chain can not meet the business needs of many enterprises, and the alliance chain of Token (token) arises at the historic moment. The so-called alliance chain refers to a block chain managed by a number of agencies. Each organization or organization manages one or more nodes, and its data only allows different institutions in the system to read, write and send.

This means that in the alliance chain, partners can solve problems more efficiently, but at the same time, the block chain is still in the initial stage of application, and the alliance chain also faces many challenges, including profit pattern, credibility, privacy issues and so on.

arms race

At the 2019 CCF block chain technology conference, Chen Chun, Professor of Zhejiang University and academician of the Chinese Academy of engineering, pointed out that in the industrialization application of the alliance chain, block chain technology can expand from single digital money application to all fields of social economy, including financial, legal, medical, energy, entertainment, public welfare and other undertakings.

In the industry view, these B oriented enterprise applications will become the main battleground of the block chain in the future, so the alliance chain will also be the mainstay of the block chain.

A block chain developer told the twenty-first Century business reporter: "there is no open Token in the alliance chain, there is no publicly raised fund, and it is easy to cooperate with supervision. Although the public chain and alliance chain have their own needs and scenarios, big companies tend to do alliance chains."

There are quite a lot of participants on the desktop. Foreign well-known alliances include IBM Hyperledger Fabric, Microsoft's Coco, enterprise Ethernet Alliance (EEA) and R3 Corda; from the domestic perspective, BAT, HUAWEI and micro enterprises all choose alliance chains.

In March 2019, the network office issued the first batch of domestic block chain information service record numbers, and there were 197 block chain information services from 18 provinces and cities in China. According to statistics, in the first 197 projects, the number of alliance chains is as high as 116, accounting for 59%, which is close to 6.

From the perspective of the route, the mainstream approach is for the enterprise itself or the BaaS Blockchain as a Service.

Li Jieli, senior director of the ant chain chain, introduced to the twenty-first Century economic report reporter: "at present, the ant chain chain is not only in the exploratory stage, but has successfully landed about 40 application scenarios, including finance, government affairs, warehouse receipts, real estate and other industries. With trust, the efficiency of the industry has been enhanced, so that the efficiency of these areas is increased from an average of 1 weeks to only 1 minutes, an average increase of 10 thousand times. At the same time, in view of small and medium-sized enterprises and developers, ant gold clothing has also launched an open alliance chain product to provide more small and medium enterprises with low cost, low technical difficulty and low threshold block chain technology usage.

Few enterprises choose open source path.

Take the micro public as an example, in 2017, the micro Union opened the FISCO BCOS open source platform. "Why do micro public do block chain? Why open source? This has become a frequently asked question by Fan Ruibin, deputy general manager of the distributed Commercial Technology Development Department of micro public bank and the head of micro public chain.

4 years ago, it pioneered the layout of blocks and laid the foundation for distributed commerce. At the very beginning, the small group chose the alliance chain. "When we first decided on the path of development, out of reverence for finance, we believe that the alliance chain is a sustainable development path that takes account of financial innovation and financial stability." Fan Ruibin told the twenty-first Century economic news reporter: "when we wanted to do the open source in 2017, the relevant talents in the team were not enough. It was from the beginning of the joint partnership to build an open source platform for the domestic alliance chain. At that time, it was also a little bit perturbed by the feeling of crossing the river. Now it seems that the route is still relatively correct."

Fan Ruibin further analyzed: "alliance chain, even today, the vast majority are not open source. But this logic does not make sense because block chains are called machines for creating trust. If the machine itself is a black box, it's not very suitable, so we want to open the black box with open source, and greatly reduce the technical threshold and psychological threshold of users.

Open source is much more than just open code. It needs a large number of partners to support and use. Therefore, the micro public has adopted the way of aggregated the upstream and downstream industry chain, and jointly with many partners to build an open source ecosystem, and urged this open source project to become more and more viable.

Hyperledger Fabric is also open to the underlying technology. It is understood that its block chain alliance has already participated in more than 250 enterprises. Many technology companies use Fabric technology to provide block chain services for businesses. At the same time, block chain developers told reporters that there are many domestic start-up companies are modified on the basis of Fabric's code and algorithm, not self research, competitiveness is not strong.

Controversies and challenges

At the same time, the alliance chain is also facing challenges, such as how to let partners in the alliance share dividends, future killer needs and scene exploration, whether to really centralization, privacy issues and so on.

A chain chaining practitioner told the economic report twenty-first Century: "the alliance chain is a trade-off between efficiency and centralization. De centralization and efficiency are scales, the public chain is the most centralized, and the efficiency is not high. The fastest public chain, the TPS in the transfer transaction (the system swallowed the measurement, the number of systems processed per second) is about 1000, but Visa's TPS can have 10000, and the efficiency is definitely the highest among the centering institutions.

Therefore, the alliance chain is based on weakening the part to centralization, and greatly improves business efficiency. Therefore, there is also a view that the alliance chain weakens the characteristics of block chain centralization rather than public chain.

And around the alliance chain and public chain system, Ma Zhitao, vice president and chief information officer of micro public bank, said that the alliance chain is not only a member of the alliance. "We believe that the participating agencies of the alliance chain can also provide services to the public through the Internet at the same time. The evolution of the alliance chain should evolve into an ecosystem for the public to provide services, which we call the "public alliance chain". It is not a single chain, but a new ecosystem based on the commercial application of block chains.

In addition, the challenge of alliance chain lies in the application scenario and business mode.

In fact, at present, there are many application scenarios, whether Hyperledger Fabric, FISCO BCOS or ant block chain, mainly for B end industry applications, including finance, logistics, supply chain and so on. In particular, open source players use more of their underlying technologies.

Fan Ruibin, for example, in the financial field, the micro public has built a supply chain financial service platform based on the block chain. The supply chain finance has long existed. In Fan Ruibin's view, the most important value of the block chain is that the application of the core enterprise can be better segmented and transferred to the small and micro enterprises at the end of the supply chain, so that small and micro enterprises can get better financial services from the financial institutions.

In addition, many stakeholder decision-making problems can also be used in block chains. Under the guidance of Shenzhen local financial regulatory authorities, the Shenzhen joint Gold Association has launched a benign voting platform for net lending institutions. In the field of intelligent government, Macao and the government have worked together to help Macao smart city construction by using block chain technology. Fan Ruibin introduced: "smart cities independently develop and complete the open source entity identity and trusted data exchange solution block chain technology" through micro public bank, so as to achieve safe and efficient inter agency identity authentication and data cooperation, and enhance the service experience of Macao residents. WeIdentity The project was completed in July, and now it is being tested, and it will be open to the public gradually at the end of the year.

For the small public block chain, the problem of profit is not considered at present. But how to make developers and partners earn money is the test. Of course, the open source ecosystem can help enterprises grasp the technology of block chain free of charge, make the system low, and help enterprises to meet the resources in the circle. But for alliance chain enterprises, how to find more B end needs and find explosive scenes is still a difficult problem.

At the moment, the alliance chain is still trying to verify the technology stage. Many block chain practitioners told reporters that the series of problems such as demand and scenario constraints, business models need to be solved, also led to small companies do not have enough motivation to concentrate on R & D. Big companies, especially Internet Co, have strong software strength, strong development power and commercial endorsement.

In addition, the alliance chain also faces technical challenges, including relative scarcity of storage space, privacy and security issues. However, block chaining technology has entered the application stage and accelerated landing. 5G and AI will become the infrastructure of digital upgrading in the future.

Li Jieli said: "from the current development trend of domestic block chain, the alliance chain is combining some characteristics of the public chain. Under the conditions of technology and compliance, alliance chain will gradually move towards a more open and more public orientation. It is expected that 2020 will become a year of the outbreak of the alliance chain. "