Alibaba Cloud expands Blockchain-as-a-Service offering to US, Europe and South East Asia

Alibaba Cloud, the cloud computing arm of Alibaba Group, is expanding its Blockchain-as-a-Service (BaaS) offering to major global markets including South East Asia, the US and Europe, Information Age reported.

According to the report, the BaaS offering supports enterprise-level blockchain applications on two platforms:

• Hyperledger Fabric, a blockchain framework implementation and one of the Hyperledger projects hosted by The Linux Foundation
• Ant Blockchain, a proprietary and multi-patented high-performing blockchain platform developed by Alibaba Group’s financial affiliate Ant Financial Services Group

“The security of BaaS is guarded by trusted computing and a secure consortium blockchain network. With this strong architecture, customers can create their own BaaS applications on Alibaba Cloud’s effective and reliable platform,” the announcement reads.

The BaaS platform will support a various applications such automatic deployment, consortium blockchain management, smart contracts, user and certificate management and SDK (Software Development Kit) applications, along with a range of monitoring, operating and maintenance functions.

“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,” said Yi Li, Senior Staff Engineer and lead of Alibaba Cloud Blockchain Service. “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.”

A number of other Chinese players have also launched blockchain platforms in the past couple of months. This includes JD.com, which launched “JD Blockchain Open Platform” in August; Tencent; and Baidu, which launched its own BaaS “Baidu Trust” in January.