FX168 Financial News Agency (Asia Pacific) reported that Ant Digital CEO Zhao Wenbiao announced the company's business progress and strategic layout for the first time since Ant Digital's independent operation in March this year at the 2024 Shanghai Bund Conference on Thursday (September 5). Ant Digital Chief Scientist Yan Ying stated at the meeting that the Web3 industry has entered a new stage of asset financing.
Zhao Wenbiao said that in the past year, the number of Ant Digital customers increased by 35%, and many of its products achieved the first market share in their respective tracks. He mentioned that going overseas is one of Ant Digital's important strategies, and in the future, it is expected that Ant Digital's overseas business will contribute 20% of the total revenue and become an important development direction. Previously, Ant Digital announced that the revenue growth rate of overseas business will reach 300% in 2023.
Zhao Wenbiao believes that as the digitalization of industries gradually enters the deep water zone, the simple integration of digital technology and traditional industries can no longer meet the development needs. The digitalization of industries must transform from a single point to a global efficiency improvement, and from a single to a full path upgrade.
Focusing on the diversified needs of industrial digitalization, Ant Digital has formed three major business segments: Cloud+, which helps enterprises enter the digital "cloud" stage and build a more powerful technology engine; the second is artificial intelligence services (AI+), which uses AI technology to reconstruct and upgrade the efficiency of risk control, marketing and other scenarios, helping enterprises to establish competitive advantages in the era of large models. The third is blockchain services (Blockchain+), which build industry trust through technology, improve digital collaboration efficiency, and accelerate the circulation of data assets.
At present, many products under Ant Digital have achieved the first market share in their respective tracks. Among them, the blockchain service brand Ant Chain accounts for 26.5% of China's BaaS market share, ranking first for four consecutive years; the privacy computing service brand Moss ranks first in China's privacy computing platform market for two consecutive years with a share of 35.3%; the security risk control brand Ant Shield also ranks first in the Asia-Pacific anti-fraud market.
With the continuous development of digitalization and the explosion of massive data, the digital collaboration of upstream and downstream of the industrial chain has become closer. Zhao Wenbiao believes that "the needs of industrial digitalization are diverse, and even cutting-edge technologies such as large model technologies are unlikely to be the only solution for industrial digitalization. Therefore, Ant Digital will invest in blockchain, IoT, privacy computing, AI and other digital technology innovations to build a digital asset circulation network and release new dividends for industrial digitalization."
During the Bund Conference, at the sub-forum hosted by Ant Digital, innovative practices around Web3 became a hot topic in the industry. Ant Digital has long invested in Web3 technology innovation and research and development, creating a high-performance, large-scale blockchain network architecture HOU, and supports cross-chain interconnection. Recently, the first cross-border RWA issued by Ant Digital in cooperation with Longxin Technology was selected as the first batch of asset tokenization cases by the Hong Kong Monetary Authority, taking a key step in empowering the real economy with Web3 technology.
Zhao Wenbiao said that the RWA model is like a small initial public offering (IPO), which can greatly improve the financing efficiency of real enterprises. In the future, Ant Digital will continue to deepen its industrial Web3, build a digital asset circulation network, build a technological bridge for more real enterprises, and enable more small and medium-sized enterprises to connect to global funds through the blockchain network and obtain more development opportunities.
At present, emerging markets such as Southeast Asia have strong demand for digitalization, and technology going overseas has become the main engine for Chinese companies to go overseas. Zhao Wenbiao said, "Ant Digital is also actively promoting the technology going overseas strategy, and will increase localized operations through various strategies such as ecosystem co-construction to seize the digital transformation opportunities in emerging markets such as Southeast Asia." It is understood that in 2023, Ant Digital's overseas revenue will grow rapidly by 300%. The mobile development platform mPaaS, security technology ZOLOZ, and Web3 technology service platform ZAN have served hundreds of overseas partners, covering multiple scenarios such as telecommunications, finance, and government affairs.
Yan Ying mentioned at the 2024 Shanghai Bund Conference that an era of highly active digital asset circulation is coming.
She judged that with the gradual maturity and popularization of Web3 technology, the assets, data and physical objects in the physical world will be tokenized and seamlessly connected with the digital world, and tokenization will make transactions more efficient, accelerate the circulation of assets, and stimulate new vitality for economic growth.
Yan Ying is an early technical member of Ant Chain. She led the team to obtain more than 5,000 blockchain patents worldwide and witnessed the leap of the Web3 era. In her speech, she said that since 2018, Web3 has successively experienced the infrastructure construction stage with "on-chain transaction volume" as the measurement standard and the data value stage with "on-chain data usage" as the main performance. Now Web3 has entered a new "asset financing stage" and the issuance of on-chain assets will move towards scale.
The typical practice of "tokenization" is the tokenization of real-world assets (RWA), which is a form of asset ownership trading on the blockchain in digital form (Token). Compared with the problem of difficulty in confirming and trading physical assets, RWA can split physical assets into multiple "on-chain" digital assets, and bring more liquidity to physical assets with the help of the interoperability of the global blockchain network.
Recently, the Hong Kong Monetary Authority announced an important progress in the first phase of its Ensemble project sandbox, and four tokenization theme cases have attracted widespread attention in the market. Taking new energy charging pile assets as an example, the listed company Langxin Technology, with the support of Ant Digital and the HKMA Ensemble project, used some charging piles operated on the platform as RWA anchor assets and successfully obtained the first RWA cross-border financing in Hong Kong, with an amount of approximately RMB 100 million.
Yan Ying believes that how to verify the authenticity of assets and how to control the risks of asset circulation are the two major challenges facing asset tokenization, and these should be solved in a technical way. She said: "Extreme performance and security and trustworthiness are the eternal pursuit of Web3 technology." In the face of large-scale on-chain asset issuance, technology must consolidate the foundation of "large-scale issuance" on the one hand, and solve the authenticity challenge of "security and trustworthiness" of assets on the other hand.
Based on this, Ant Chain has built a trusted digital twin technology and a large-scale blockchain open architecture with blockchain as the core, supporting 100,000-level transaction TPS performance, second-level transaction on-chain time, and PB-level data ledger storage and processing capabilities. In addition, Ant Chain has built a full trust closed loop on and off the chain, using secure and verifiable basic technologies to ensure the extension of trust. Through AI-assisted contract auditing tools, it provides efficient, accurate, and comprehensive contract security services.