Source: Xinhua.
A heavyweight player has joined the blockchain camp. Bilibili recently started internal testing of its “High Energy Chain” metaverse business, launched a block browser tool, and said it will use blockchain to build a digital-native community for original-content creators.
As the traditional internet dividend approaches its ceiling, deploying blockchain, like deploying cloud and AI, is a strategic move aimed at a second life in the next internet era. Alibaba, Tencent and Baidu have spent recent years exploring blockchain applications across sectors. The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology’s 14th Five-Year Plan for the information and communication industry mentions blockchain more than a dozen times, highlighting it as key infrastructure for expanding digital development space, and its service capacity is set to strengthen markedly over the plan period.
Big tech’s first steps onto the chain
As the underlying technology for decentralised transactions in finance, blockchain’s value was quickly recognised by tech investors, and the most agile internet giants moved in.
Within the Alibaba ecosystem, Ant Group spent 14 years cultivating the soil. Its first real application, launched in 2016, used blockchain to track charity donations, tracing every contribution and raising 198,000 yuan for ten hearing-impaired children from nearly 50,000 donors. Ant went on to launch the world’s first blockchain-based e-wallet cross-border remittance service and China’s first healthcare blockchain application. JD.com began in 2016 with product anti-counterfeiting traceability, and in 2017 formed China’s first food-safety blockchain traceability alliance with Walmart and IBM. Baidu launched the Tuteng original-image copyright platform in 2018, generating a copyright DNA for each image through blockchain registration with timestamp and chain-stamp verification, and later put Baike’s edit history on chain for transparency and traceability.
“At first, internet companies chased blockchain purely for demand-driven reasons: wherever the market had a need, they assessed whether the technology fit the scenario,” said Sun Yulin, senior researcher at the OKLink Blockchain Research Institute. “For Tencent and Alibaba, blockchain often started inside individual business units, driven by a land-grab mentality.”
Bilibili’s High Energy Chain follows the same logic. The company describes it as a digital-native community for new applications, culture, games and digital assets, currently focused on content copyright protection, offering ownership certification for digital works and, later, community governance. In the third quarter of 2021 Bilibili reached 267 million monthly active users spending an average of 88 minutes a day on the platform; adding NFTs and digital identities directly to user-generated content promises copyright protection for creators, new consumption scenarios and stronger incentives to create.
Stronger empowerment in the 14th Five-Year period
Overseas technology giants have tended to value blockchain’s long-term effects over short-term gains. Microsoft showed foresight in 2015 by launching the Azure BaaS programme, bringing blockchain into Azure so customers could quickly create private, public or hybrid blockchain environments. IBM, despite setbacks elsewhere, co-founded the Hyperledger open-source project in 2015 and within a year applied mature blockchain solutions across finance, healthcare and trade supply chains.
Blockchain is now a national strategic direction. Under the 14th Five-Year ICT plan, internet vendors are expected to turn their early application experience into general-purpose, easy-to-use, standardised products that underpin digital upgrading. “Vendors are already building platforms that let companies quickly develop and deploy decentralised blockchain architectures, cutting deployment and maintenance costs so that companies of all sizes can build blockchain public-service platforms,” said Liu Quan, dean of the CCID Blockchain Research Institute.
On the Forbes 2021 Global Blockchain 50, internet companies have become a force that cannot be ignored, with Ant Group, Tencent and Baidu among those listed. Ant’s blockchain platform runs more than 50 applications across government services, livelihood programmes and other fields; its OpenChain, launched in 2020, lets small and medium enterprises use blockchain and smart contracts to cut costs, and has signed up more than 6,000 users who have executed 100,000 smart contracts facilitating 400 million transactions. Baidu has fused blockchain with AI, privacy computing, the internet of things and big data into commercial solutions for more than 30 scenarios, and its Libra Chain provides infrastructure for three internet courts that handle copyright and e-commerce disputes; the Beijing Internet Court alone has accepted more than 35 million pieces of electronic evidence.
The must-have application has not arrived yet
Thanks to policy support at central and local levels, blockchain has entered an era of industrialised, batch-scale deployment, with infrastructure and projects concentrated in finance, government services and justice, while traceability, industrial, healthcare and agricultural uses mature gradually.
Wei Kai, deputy head of the Cloud Computing and Big Data Research Institute at the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, described three stages of blockchain adoption: first, putting tamper-proof data on chain as notarisation, the simplest but limited use; second, data sharing and multi-party collaboration between institutions; and third, the circulation of value, aligning the flows of commerce, information and funds. The second and third stages have not yet arrived, and the whole industry is pushing exploration in that direction.
“Infrastructure at scale must land on applications, and that is exactly the difficulty for the whole industry, internet firms included. Immature technology is one reason, but the deeper problem is that the winner-takes-all business model of the internet era clashes with the decentralised, multi-centre mindset, and that takes time,” Wei said.
Zhu Liehuang, a professor at Beijing Institute of Technology and secretary-general of the blockchain committee of the China Computer Federation, said blockchain is currently used mainly to replace existing technology inside parts of business logic and to build trusted multi-party platforms, while efficiency and cost still have room to improve. For now, most industries do not need to share all data across all nodes, so sharing can be layered by business logic, and blockchain at this stage is more a complement and enrichment of internet business models than a replacement.
The next generation of the internet is likely to be multi-centred and will rely heavily on blockchain to build a trusted operating model, which fits the policy expectation of bringing positive incentives to the real economy while making blockchain a healthy tool for unlocking data value. Competition and cooperation among internet companies may pivot accordingly, opening entirely new modes of same-industry cooperation.
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