JD.com announces blockchain focused ‘smart cities’ initiative

JD Finance, a division of Chinese e-commerce giant JD.com, has established the Smart City Research Institute at its Nanjing HQ, which will focus on AI, Big Data and blockchain technologies, the People’s Daily reports.

Revolutionary road

JD.com has been busy in the DLT space of late. In June, it joined blockchain consortium Hyperledger. “Blockchain technology is a revolution that can facilitate mutual trust in business and improve operational efficiency. The Hyperledger community is highly productive and has extensive practical experience. We are pleased to join this big family and will build win-win collaborations in the near future,” commented Dr. Pei Jian, the Head of the Blockchain Technology team at JD.com.

“We will make full use of our own advances in Big Data, cloud computing and well-established bonds with enormous suppliers worldwide to build a blockchain-based ecosystem and accomplish new commercial values. Currently, blockchain has been used in the products of anti-counterfeiting traceability in JD.com for promoting and securing high-quality products.”

And in August it unveiled a new Blockchain-as-a-Service (BaaS) platform. JD Blockchain Open Platform enables customers to create and adjust smart contracts on public and private enterprise clouds. The technology can help companies streamline operational procedures such as tracking and tracing the movement of goods and charity donations, authenticity certification, property assessment, transaction settlements and digital copyrights, the retailer says.

The initiative is part of its Retail as a Service (RaaS) strategy. The first partner to use it is China Pacific Insurance Company (CPIC), which tapped the platform to deploy a traceable system for e-invoices, or fapiao’. The system strengthens the security governance of e-invoices by applying unique blockchain IDs to each document, increasing efficiency and streamlining the accounting process, it claims.