Chinese Retail Giant Launches A Blockchain Lab For Research Purposes

The Chinese retail giant JD.com is in the latest blockchain news, after launching a research lab for blockchain that is in partnership with two technology institutes.

According to the announcement that was published on October 30th, the Jingdong Group (JD.com) is a leading Chinese eCommerce company which controls about 30% of the business-to-consumer (B2C) market in China, reportedly having a total of 314 million active users.

As the announcement reads, JD has partnered with the Ying Wu College of Computing at the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT) as well as the institute of Software at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (ISCAS) in order to establish blockchain technology lab. The main aim is for the lab to be geared towards solving efficiency problems and examining new applications for the technology.

In line with the other projects and objectives of the lab, JD has cited its long-term joint research efforts in the fundamental consensus protocols, privacy protection as well as security in the decentralised applications (dApps).

Last month, the company established the Smart City Research Institute in Nanjing, which will aim at improving the “smart city” construction with the use of artificial intelligence (AI), big data, as well as blockchain technologies.

In August 2018, the company also revealed its new blockchain-as-a-service (BaaS) platform dubbed JD Blockchain Open Platform, designed to help commercial customers to build, host as well as implement blockchain solutions without developing technologies from scratch.