JD.com, China’s largest retailer and e-commerce provider, has deployed an open blockchain platform to enable customers to have their own blockchain solutions to improve the transparency, efficiency and security of their operations, the company announced on its corporate blog.
The JD Blockchain Open Platform expands the company’s Retail as a Service and will allow customers to build smart contracts on both private and public enterprise clouds.
The platform will allow companies to streamline tracking of product movement, property assessments, digital copyrights and authenticity certifications. The company oversees quality control of its offerings on the app store to allow users to customize applications.
Numerous Offerings Available
The platform includes an application store that offers software and numerous blockchain base layers developed by independent software vendors as well as JD.com’s internal development team.
The platform will be especially helpful to companies lacking the capability to develop blockchain solutions on their own.
China Pacific Insurance Company (CPIC) has become the first JD.com partner to use the open blockchain platform. The insurance company applies a unique blockchain ID to each invoice document, improving the efficiency and streamlining the accounting process, thereby strengthening the security governance of electronic invoices.
Yanhong Pan, vice president and chief financial officer at CPIC, said the e-invoice system has improved operational efficiency.
Jian Pei, who oversees big data and smart supply chain at J.D.com, said the open platform was initially developed for the company’s own operations to improve visibility to consumers.
Blockchain Innovation Continues
Earlier this year, JD.com launched AI Catapult, a blockchain and artificial intelligence accelerator, and has developed AI applications at a Silicon Valley lab as well as in China.
AI Catapult already includes companies such as Bankorous, a Chinese fintech provider; CanYa, an Australia based cryptocurrency company; Bluezelle, a Singapore based blockchain-powered database service; Nuggets, a blockchain-based ID platform and payments platform based in London; and Devery, a blockchain based product verification protocol.
Last year, JD.com introduced a blockchain platform to allow customers to track the development process for products and food items they buy. This initiative deployed blockchain based tracing for more than 11,000 stock keeping units and 400 brands.
JD.com will also work with certificate authorities and software providers to examine ways to apply blockchain for business uses, such as enterprise resource planning.
