A few days ago, both JD Digits and Ant Group have disclosed their listing prospectuses, and their blockchain business and layout have also attracted industry attention and comparison.
According to statistics from Tiantian Lianxun, Ant Group mentioned “blockchain” more than 130 times in its prospectus, and JD Digits mentioned blockchain nearly 90 times in its prospectus.
It can be seen that, as the world's advanced digital technology companies, both companies regard blockchain as an important part of their strategic layout.
Compared with BAT, JD.com can be said to be a catcher in the layout of the blockchain, but its development speed is very fast, and it has achieved good results in technology, product development and application.
However, JD.com's current blockchain development is also in an embarrassing situation where "BAT" and others are far ahead in the past, and "chasers" are relentlessly chasing after them.
In the short term, it is unrealistic for JD.com's blockchain to catch up with Ali, Tencent, etc., but it is not without a way to "break the situation".
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The Embarrassing Situation of "JD Blockchain"
It seems that it intends to compete with its old rivals. As Ali's Ant Group is about to go public, JD.com's JD Digits also launched an IPO sprint.
On the evening of September 11, the official website of the Shanghai Stock Exchange showed that the IPO review status of JD Digits Science and Technology Innovation Board was changed to "accepted". The sponsors are Guotai Junan and Minmetals Securities, and the company plans to raise 20 billion yuan for this listing.
In the prospectuses of JD Digits and Ant Group, there is a word that appears many times, and is regarded by the two companies as one of the important strategic layouts in the future. This word is "blockchain".
According to statistics from Tiantian Lianxun, Ant Group mentioned “blockchain” more than 130 times in its prospectus, and JD Digits mentioned blockchain nearly 90 times in its prospectus.
As one of the infrastructures of the digital economy, the blockchain has risen to become a national strategy and has been included in the new infrastructure. With the strong support of policies, blockchain is becoming a hot topic.
For digital technology companies such as JD Digits and Ant Group, which are preparing to go public, disclosing their blockchain layout has many advantages: first, it can show their technical strength; second, it shows that they can enjoy policy dividends; third, Explain that you are planning for the future.
However, unlike Ant Group, which officially upgraded the ant blockchain to the "ant chain" before listing, and carried out extensive media publicity, JD Digits is more "low-key" in the external publicity of the blockchain.
JD Digital's "low profile" on the blockchain may be related to its current embarrassing situation, because although JD's blockchain strength is not weak in the industry, it is still relatively large compared with Ali, Tencent, Baidu, etc. difference.
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Source: Compiled by Lianta Think Tank and China Business Industry Research Institute
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Source: IPRdaily and incoPat Innovation Index Research Center
In addition, in terms of the commercialization revenue of the blockchain business, Ali, Tencent, Huawei, etc. have signed multiple large orders from the government or enterprises, while JD.com’s blockchain is currently more for internal ecological applications. This aspect is slightly insufficient.
On the whole, JD.com’s blockchain currently seems to be in an embarrassing situation of “more than the top and more than the bottom”. There are “big mountains” such as Ali and Tencent in the front that seem insurmountable, and there are blockchains such as FunChain Technology behind. Enterprises are in hot pursuit and may be surpassed at any time.
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The chase of latecomers
Compared with BAT, JD.com can be said to be a catcher in the layout of the blockchain.
JD.com's blockchain layout began in October 2016. It is said that Tsinghua University, IBM and Wal-Mart cooperated and planned to use blockchain technology for food traceability. The person in charge of JD.com's Y business department attended the meeting. After returning home, he asked his subordinates to understand blockchain technology and see which business scenarios it can be applied in JD.com.
And in this year, Alibaba has launched a points mall based on blockchain technology - Yunyou Mall, and first applied blockchain technology to the Alipay love donation platform.
Tencent has basically completed the complete accumulation of the underlying technology, and released the first blockchain white paper in the Internet industry in April 2017.
Baidu invested in the American blockchain payment company Circle this year, and issued the first consortium chain using blockchain technology - on-site ABS.
That is to say, in 2016, when JD.com first started to pay attention to and understand the blockchain within the company, Alibaba, Baidu, Tencent, etc. had already accumulated a certain amount of technology and applied it in some scenarios.
JD.com, as a latecomer, began to catch up.
In February 2017, the Jingdong blockchain project team was established. In July, JD.com officially released an open platform for blockchain anti-counterfeiting and traceability, which is free for brand owners in the JD.com ecosystem.
In 2017, JD.com also "digged" three high-end AI talents in just four months, namely Shen Yuanqing, former chairman of Asia Pacific Technology, former IBM Watson chief scientist Zhou Bowen, and former Amazon chief scientist Bo Liefeng.
In January 2018, Pei Jian, the world's top big data AI expert, joined JD.com as the vice president of JD.com, in charge of the big data platform and product R&D department. It was also in this year that JD.com's blockchain developed rapidly.
In 2018, JD released the blockchain white paper, launched the "Hash Manor" blockchain applet, officially launched the BaaS "Zhizhen Chain" blockchain platform, established a blockchain joint laboratory, and "JD Finance" also Quietly changed its name to "Jingdong Digits"...Liu Qiangdong even said, "We will use blockchain and other technologies to recreate the entire retail industry."
JD.com's efforts to catch up have also achieved good results, successfully creating "Zhizhen Chain", a blockchain technology brand under JD Digital. The meaning of the three words "Zhizhen Chain" is that JD.com will use blockchain, an intelligent technology, to serve people's better life as the goal, and connect partners to create value together.
JD.com has also formed a blockchain architecture system consisting of JD Chain and JD BaaS (Blockchain as a Service), and has implemented landing applications in scenarios such as supply chain traceability, finance, and logistics.
In fact, although JD.com is "one step behind" in the layout of the blockchain, it has become a "rising star" in the blockchain field by virtue of its high attention and rapid catching up.
In March 2019, JD.com took the lead in open-sourcing the underlying engine of the blockchain among domestic Internet companies. As a self-developed enterprise-level blockchain framework system, JD Chain, the underlying engine of Zhizhen Chain, is suitable for a variety of general business scenarios. It adopts a componentized design concept, and the components such as consensus, ledger, contract, and storage are pluggable and replaceable. Enterprises can customize the combination of system components like building blocks according to the needs of different businesses.
In addition, based on the open source of JD Chain, JD.com has developed the JD BaaS platform (Zhizhen Chain Blockchain as a Service Platform), which allows users to build an operational multi-organization blockchain network in just 30 seconds.
The Zhizhen Chain anti-counterfeiting traceability platform that JD.com has been building since 2017 is also one of its featured products. According to the "JD Blockchain Technology Practice White Paper (2019)" data, as of the end of February 2019, the JD Blockchain anti-counterfeiting traceability platform has more than 1.3 billion pieces of on-chain data, more than 700 cooperative brands, and more than 50,000 SKUs settled in , more than 2.8 million after-sales user access inquiries.
According to the data previously released by JD.com, the use of the Zhizhen Chain anti-counterfeiting traceability platform has brought about a 9.97% increase in overall sales, of which, the additional purchases of maternal and infant products increased by 23.4%, the repurchase rate of nutritional health products increased by 44.6%, and the maternal and infant milk powder The return rate dropped by 31.7%, fully proving the application value of blockchain anti-counterfeiting traceability.
At present, JD Digits has formed Zhizhen Chain anti-counterfeiting traceability platform, Zhizhen Chain pharmaceutical traceability platform, Zhizhen Chain cloud signing electronic contract platform, Zhizhen Chain digital certificate storage platform, JD BaaS platform, JD Chain engine, hydrogen boat digital Seven major products of the asset property rights service platform.
Its blockchain products are also applied in scenarios such as intellectual property protection, vaccine traceability, supply chain traceability, public welfare traceability, financial ABS solutions, and advertising monitoring solutions.
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game breaker
Although Jingdong's blockchain is developing rapidly, it is still unrealistic to catch up with Ali and Tencent in the short term. However, JD.com may be able to find another way to "break the game" by virtue of innovations in blockchain business models and application scenarios.
One is to innovate the business model of blockchain. In fact, the business model problem is also a major problem that plagues the further development of the blockchain industry. If JD.com’s blockchain can explore a good business model, it will be able to establish its own competitive advantage.
At present, the industrial digitization "TIE" business model of "Technology + Industry + Ecosystem" pioneered by JD Digits has certain innovation and uniqueness, and is a very good business model. try.
The second is to focus on building the unique advantages of JD blockchain in some scenarios. The ecological system and first-mover advantages that JD Group has built in the logistics and retail fields have accumulated a large number of users, data, technologies and industry insights, laying a unique foundation for JD Digits' digital ecological scenarios.
The blockchain of JD Digits can build its own unique advantages in supply chain traceability and digital finance around the two fields of logistics and retail. Compared with pure blockchain technology companies, this is also a major competitive advantage of JD Blockchain.
The third is to continue to increase investment in scientific research and human resources. As a digital technology company, investment in technology research and development and top talents cannot be stingy. JD.com should increase investment in blockchain research and development, and go further in terms of technical strength and patent applications.
The fourth is to carry out forward-looking layout. Compared with companies such as BAT, JD.com's blockchain layout is already one step behind. In the next development, JD Digits should pay more attention to the new developments and new trends in the blockchain field, and carry out forward-looking layout.
At the 2019 Jingdong Global Technology Discovery Conference (JD Discovery) held in November last year, Cao Peng, vice president of Jingdong Digital Technology Group, released the Jingdong blockchain 2020 strategy - "from trusted supply chain to digital financial innovation".
At the conference, the JD blockchain team identified five directions for the integration of blockchain and industrial applications, including supply chain traceability, digital certificate storage, financial technology, regulatory technology, and C-end innovative applications. JD.com will continue to carry out industrial application attempts in these fields, and open up mature experience and application APIs.
In fact, JD.com's blockchain layout is also reflected in JD Digital's prospectus. According to the prospectus, the blockchain technology independently developed by JD Digital has been applied to various business scenarios such as asset securitization ABS, commodity traceability, digital deposit certificates, and electronic contracts. And the research and development of blockchain projects such as "OTC trading alliance platform based on blockchain technology" is underway.
Not long ago, the JACOBI Blockchain Innovation Laboratory of JD Digital Technology Group released a series of phased scientific research results. According to statistics, these achievements have been published in top international conferences and journals such as PODC, CCS, NDSS, and ICDCS in the form of 7 papers, which are at the leading level in domestic blockchain research and industry circles.
In addition, the Digital Currency Research Institute of the People's Bank of China has also formally reached a strategic cooperation with JD Digits. Based on the digital RMB project, the two parties will jointly promote the research and development of mobile basic technology platforms and blockchain technology platforms.
As a "catch-up", the development of JD's blockchain can be said to have achieved remarkable results. We will wait and see whether the listing of JD Digits can help it go further.
