Alibaba Cloud Expands Blockchain-as-a-Service to South-East Asia, U.S., and Europe

Blockchain Technology 2 min, 4 sec READ

by Ricardo Carrasco

The new BaaS platform by Alibaba Cloud will cater international markets, following their increased supply of services to the UK market.

Alibaba Cloud, the cloud division of Jack Ma´s famous Alibaba Group, has announced the expansion of their blockchain-as-a-service (BaaS) platform to the American, European, and South East Asian markets, just a few weeks after launching two data centers in the UK to address the increased demand for their services in the region.

Yi Li, the lead of Alibaba Cloud Blockchain Service and Senior Staff Engineer, commented on the success of their BaaS platform, and their privileged use of some of Intel's latest products,

Our customers in China have already experienced the benefits from our BaaS platform and we are excited to extend this service to other enterprise customers all over the world […] Alibaba Cloud is also the first blockchain service provider of Intel SGX security technology. We aim to become a technology partner that enables companies that wish to use blockchain to accelerate their digital transformation.

The company´s BaaS platform will support blockchain applications catered to enterprises and based on the Ant Blockchain and Hyperledger Fabric. These include, for example, monitoring, operating, and maintenance applications, blockchain consortium management, user and certificate management, automatic deployment, SDK applications, and smart contracts. Ant Blockchain is a proprietary multi-patented blockchain developed by Alibaba´s affiliate Ant Services Group. Hyperledger Fabric is one of the blockchain projects hosted by The Linux Foundation.

Brian Behlendorf, Executive Director at Hyperledger shared his excitement about the initiative,

We’re delighted to see the launch of Alibaba Cloud BaaS powered by Hyperledger Fabric, as we’ve already seen many Hyperledger use cases in production this year. As stated in MIT’s recent whitepaper, 2018 is set to be another blockbuster year for the industry with record amount of capital to be injected into companies in the space, and hyperledger is committed to the development of blockchain technologies in China. Together with Alibaba Cloud, we look forward to bringing more exciting innovations to the global blockchain communities.

The Alibaba Group is but the latest of many enterprises jumping into the BaaS wagon. Just this week the Chinese division of Amazon Web Services announced the beginning of a partnership with the Qtum Project to develop blockchain-as-a-service (BaaS) products for developers and businesses. The partnership will also allow AWS’s client base to "quickly, efficiently, and cost-effectively" create and launch their own smart contracts using Amazon Machine Images.