Alibaba Cloud has entered the blockchain space race.

After announcing its European expansion — described as a significant milestone for organisation cloud adoption in the EMEA region — the cloud computing arm of Alibaba Group has announced the expansion of its Blockchain-as-a-Service (BaaS) offering to major global markets including South East Asia, the US and Europe.

As organisations look at how they can take advantage of blockchain, and understand what are the applications of the technology, Blockchain-as-a-Service offerings are appearing with more and more vendors.

These platforms are based on leading blockchain technologies, with the intention of helping customers build a secure and stable environment for blockchain implementations.

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Alibaba Cloud’s BaaS supports enterprise-level blockchain applications on the two platforms of Hyperledger Fabric and Ant Blockchain.

According to the announcement: ‘Hyperledger is a multi-project, multi-stakeholder effort that includes 10 business blockchain and distributed ledger technologies (DLT). Hyperledger Fabric is a blockchain framework implementation and one of the Hyperledger projects hosted by The Linux Foundation. Ant Blockchain, developed by Alibaba Group’s financial affiliate Ant Financial Services Group, is a proprietary and multi-patented high-performing blockchain platform. 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 benefits of Blockchain-as-a-Service

“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.”

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The BaaS platform will supports a wide range of applications including automatic deployment, consortium blockchain management, smart contracts, user and certificate management and SDK (Software Development Kit) applications, as well as a range of monitoring, operating and maintenance functions.

“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 MIIT’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,” said Brian Behlendorf, Executive Director, Hyperledger.