Ant Group continues to expand its business into blockchain and Web3 industry opportunities.
The subsidiary of Chinese conglomerate Alibaba Group Holding and operator of Alipay, one of the world's largest mobile payment platforms, has unveiled its new brand called ZAN to boost its capabilities in Web3, the innovation that is seen as the next decentralized and distributed generation of the World Wide Web.
Through this new brand, Ant Group plans to offer development services for blockchain-based Web3 applications.
According to local reports, ZAN's services will be targeted at China's special administrative region, Hong Kong, and overseas markets.
ZAN, a brand for Web3 development
Ant Group’s new brand will provide Web3 developers, both institutional and individual, with a full suite of technical services and new tools that facilitate the development of decentralized applications (DApps) and other innovative projects, while ensuring security and compliance.
Wang Xiaohang, vice president of Ant Group, stressed that with this new brand, the company will contribute to solving the compliance challenges presented by the development in the blockchain and Web3 industry today.
In this way, the company's clients will be able to issue and manage real world assets on the blockchain and access node services, among others, while complying with regulatory procedures required by law, such as Know Your Customer (KYC) regulations and anti-money laundering regulations. Ant Group is betting on building a more interconnected ecosystem to facilitate the development of the Web3 industry and make the technology more inclusive.
ZAN was launched during the Inclusion Conference on the Bund 2023, held in Shanghai last week.
During the conference, decentralized identifier provider HashKey DID announced that it would be one of the first to adopt Ant Group’s new Web3 solutions via ZAN.
Ant Group's journey towards Web3
Ant Group began its journey into the blockchain world in 2015. Eric Jing, executive chairman of Ant Group, said that blockchain technology had the potential to redefine trust in the digital age and solve real-life problems, as well as strengthen transparency and build trust in industries that traditionally involved complex processes. Because of all this potential, Ant Group was focusing on the research and development of this technological innovation.
Five years later, in 2020, Ant Group introduced its blockchain solution AntChain. Through a press release, the company highlighted that AntChain would function as a new technological brand of Ant Group, which in addition to blockchain also involved other innovative technologies, such as Artificial Intelligence and the Internet of Things (IoT).
AntChain is a blockchain-based solutions platform that has the capacity to process and support one billion user accounts and one billion transactions every day. Ant Group highlighted that through this brand it would help accelerate the adoption of blockchain, bringing this innovative technology closer to its thousands of customers. “We look forward to contributing to the acceleration of blockchain-enabled industry transformations and working with our partners to make blockchain technology more accessible to users,” the company said.
In addition to launching AntChain, Ant Group also introduced a workstation designed to reduce the implementation time of the company’s blockchain solutions by up to 90%, and in March of this year, announced the launch of AntChain OpenLab, a project focused on the core development of Web3.
Ant Group is also among the companies that top the list with the highest number of patent applications related to the world of blockchain.
Its parent company, Alibaba Group, has also launched several tools, such as the Alibaba Cloud blockchain node service, with which it seeks to take its users on an immersive journey towards Web3.
Continue reading: Alibaba launches incubator for Web3 game developers in Japan
