The blockchain is ushering in major benefits, who can stand out from the top players of the alliance chain?

Interchain Pulse (ID: HiveEcon)

Interchain Pulse (ID: HiveEcon)

, Author: Mutual Chain Pulse·Jinzuoche, published by Odaily with authorization.

According to news from Xinhua News Agency on the evening of October 25, the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China conducted the eighteenth collective study on the development status and trends of blockchain technology on the afternoon of October 24. Xi Jinping, general secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, emphasized when presiding over the study that the blockchain should be used as an important breakthrough for independent innovation of core technologies, and the development of blockchain technology and industrial innovation should be accelerated.

At the same time, Xinhua News Agency reported that the current application of blockchain technology has been extended to digital finance, Internet of Things, intelligent manufacturing, supply chain management, digital asset transactions and other fields.

Mutual Chain Pulse is concerned that after the big waves in recent years, the first echelon of the alliance chain has been formed, and it has played a major role in accelerating the development of ecological construction and the realization of landing applications. This vanguard includes: Fabric, which is mainly contributed by IBM, FISCO BCOS jointly developed by WeBank and the Golden Chain Alliance Open Source Working Group, and Ant Alliance Chain led by Ant Blockchain.

The reason why these three alliance chains are listed as the first echelon is not only because they have deep contributions from large technology companies such as IBM, WeBank, and Ant Financial. More importantly, the three parties have many commonalities: a large number of landing applications that have been produced, independently developed alliance chain platforms (many domestic alliance chains have adopted their technologies), open and open source operating ideas, and several years of research and development history. Many fans.

And these three alliance chain "pioneers" have explored different development paths in the process of developing blockchain technology and applications.

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Fabric and FISCO BCOS lead the direction of open source, and Ant Alliance Chain catches up

In 2015 and 2016, blockchain technology was the trend. Ethereum has just launched its mainnet, and the emergence of smart contracts has inspired large companies at home and abroad to tentatively enter this field.

It was also at this time that the large enterprises in the first echelon of the future alliance chain, WeBank, IBM, and Ant Financial started their respective blockchain layouts.

In 2015, WeBank began to conduct blockchain research. In May 2016, WeBank, together with Shenzhen Financial Technology Association and more than 20 financial institutions and technology companies, jointly initiated the establishment of the Golden Chain Alliance. Then in 2017, the Open Source Working Group of Golden Chain Alliance launched FISCO BCOS, an open source blockchain underlying technology platform. In 2018, 9 iterations of FISCO BCOS were updated, and version 2.0 was released in 2019.

In December 2015, the Linux Foundation and IBM led the launch of Hyperledger, an open source project aimed at promoting cross-industry applications of blockchain. Hyperledger Fabric is one of the more important blockchain projects in Hyperledger. In September 2016, the preview version of Fabric 0.6 was released, mainly based on the code contributed by IBM; in March 2017, the 1.0 alpha version was launched.

On the other hand, the domestic Ant Financial was also established as a blockchain experiment group in 2015, and established the Ant Blockchain in the following 2016. At the end of 2018, Ant Financial independently registered "Ant Blockchain Technology Co., Ltd." However, the initial Ant Blockchain was not open source, perhaps to explore the future development trend. Ant Blockchain announced the opening of the service market on October 22, 2019, and plans to launch the open alliance chain in November and launch the Daap publishing platform in December.

As a result, China's alliance chain open platform and the coexistence of the three swords have formally formed, and the construction of open source has become an important direction for the development of the three swords.

"Open source and community are important forms of blockchain technology advancement." In July this year, Zhang Kaixiang, the chief blockchain architect of WeBank and in charge of the FISCO BCOS platform design, once said, "WeBank has always adhered to an open Thinking welcomes distributed business and builds a distributed business ecosystem based on blockchain."

At the same time, Mutual Chain Pulse observed that among the three alliance chain platforms, the open source construction of FISCO BCOS is the most prominent.

It is understood that FISCO BCOS currently has tens of thousands of community members and more than 500 companies and institutions participating in the joint construction, governance and sharing. In addition to GitHub, there are also official technical exchange groups, and online and offline multi-form operational activities have been launched one after another.

It is reported that its online activities include technical exchanges, event organization, project support and consultation, etc., and regularly hold blockchain topic sharing every week. Offline activities include national touring Meetup, Golden Chain Alliance China Blockchain Application Competition, Hackathon, etc.

Compared with foreign open source communities, FISCO BCOS has obvious local advantages. In addition to being more convenient for domestic developers to communicate in language, it is also more in line with the habits and styles of Chinese people.

Fabric relies on the Hyperledger organization, and its community building is relatively mature, and an international community has been built so far. In addition to being relatively active on GitHub, it has also promoted a large number of offline Meetups and technology promotion activities; coupled with the strong promotion of IBM, it has a large number of active users.

It is worth mentioning that in terms of distributed identity authentication, Hyperledger's Indy and WeBank's WeIdendity project are also typical solutions in this field.

In addition to the above-mentioned online and offline activities, compared with Fabric and Ant Blockchain, FISCO BCOS seems to be more complete in terms of content construction. The typical cases discussed in its offline activities will be launched in the form of video courses on the MOOC Blockchain Academy of People's Daily Online for users to openly learn; the platform also cooperates with many famous universities in China to offer blockchain courses, which can be obtained Credits and certifications.

Not only that, it is understood that there are currently more than 500 partners in the FISCO BCOS open source ecosystem, including regulatory agencies, government departments, standards organizations, scientific research institutions, universities, technical communities, system integrators, cloud platforms, consulting companies, security Evaluation, media, individual developers and other role partners.

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The application scenarios of the three major alliance chains are rich and the number of applications of Fabric and FISCO BCOS is large

The development and growth of the open source ecosystem is often achieved through the continuous advancement of application projects.

Mutual Chain Pulse is concerned that the three projects of the first echelon, FISCO BCOS, Fabric, and Ant Alliance Chain, have certain similarities in application, that is, they all start with finance and expand to multiple fields.

FISCO BCOS is an enterprise-level blockchain underlying platform that meets the needs of the financial industry with leading research and development by domestic enterprises, security and controllability, and external open source. Starting from finance, but not limited to the financial field, FISCO BCOS gradually covers more application fields such as cultural copyright, judicial services, government services, Internet of Things, financial industry, smart communities, and public welfare undertakings.

According to the disclosure of the FISCO BCOS open source community in the first half of the year, the number of landing applications based on FISCO BCOS and running in the production environment has exceeded 60. In terms of copyright, in July this year, People's Daily Online launched the "People's Copyright" platform, which builds a news copyright alliance chain based on the underlying technology of the FISCO BCOS blockchain; in terms of government affairs, in February this year, the Macau government used blockchain technology as a The main fulcrum is to promote the construction of a smart city and the development of a future city in the Macao Special Administrative Region; in terms of judicial certificate deposit, in January this year, Shenzhen Securities Tong, in conjunction with Pacific Insurance, Guotai Junan and other institutions, launched a certificate deposit service based on FISCO BCOS to achieve synchronization across the network. Data cannot be tampered with, and trace information cannot be denied...

Due to the open source nature of the platform, in addition to the disclosed application projects, there are actually many application projects that are constantly being explored, and the number of landing applications that actually run in the production environment may not stop there. As early as December 2018, nearly 300 entries based on FISCO BCOS research and development were received in the Golden Chain Alliance China Blockchain Application Competition.

While the number and speed of implementation are increasing, the quality of its application projects is also guaranteed.

In July, at the third China Blockchain Development Competition sponsored by China Institute of Electronics Standardization and Xiaoshan District People's Government of Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province, 4 of the 11 winning projects were developed based on the FISCO BCOS underlying platform.

In addition to these applications, WeBank released the blockchain-optimized social governance model reference framework "Shandu" in September, proposing a new development path for the development of the blockchain industry. From this point of view, WeBank advocates the realization of the social value of the blockchain.

Fabric was originally defined as creating a general-purpose blockchain open source framework regardless of industry. And it took the lead in promoting the application in the financial field, and then developed to many fields.

The goal of Ant Blockchain is similar to that of FISCO BCOS. It is to build a financial-level and economic-level blockchain underlying platform with independent property rights, and to blossom in many aspects such as people's livelihood, business, and government affairs. Ant Blockchain is indeed advancing along this goal.

At the Yunqi Conference Ant Blockchain Ecological Summit held at the end of September, Jiang Guofei, vice president of Ant Financial Services Group, revealed that the Ant Blockchain has implemented more than 40 applications. Including cross-border payment, supply chain finance, general traceability, electronic bills and other industries. At the same time, it announced the cooperation with Bayer, the world's largest seed and pesticide company, to further expand the application direction.

The technical strength of the first echelon of the alliance chain "three pioneers" is neck and neck

(Tabulation: Interlink Pulse)

The landing of each alliance chain application project is supported by the technical strength of each platform. Interchain Pulse observes these three platforms from the aspects of performance, security, expansion, and ease of use, and each has its own advantages.

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(Tabulation: Interlink Pulse)

FISCO BCOS currently supports both PBFT and RAFT consensus methods. PBFT is a BFT-like consensus, which enables the network to support a weak trust environment. FISCO BCOS also optimizes the PBFT consensus process to fully improve consensus efficiency. In addition, FISCO BCOS combined with smart contracts can support the dynamic addition and withdrawal of nodes from the network. The ant blockchain also supports the PBFT consensus algorithm.

Fabric used the PBFT consensus protocol in version 0.6, and switched to Kafka to achieve consensus in version 1.0. Compared with the POW consensus algorithm, Kafka is more efficient, energy-saving and environmentally friendly, and provides a fault-tolerant mechanism to ensure the stable operation of the system. However, Fabric has certain limitations. Many comments in the industry believe that the kafka mechanism of Fabric is not decentralized enough, and the single-chain throughput of the current version of Fabric is 3000TPS, which is not superior to that of FISCO BCOS and Ant Alliance Chain.

At the same time, the TPS of the alliance chain platform led by the two Chinese teams has exceeded 10,000, and the TPS of Ant Blockchain has reached 25,000+; the block generation speed has reached the second level. Security, scalability, and ease of use also have their own characteristics. The measured TPS of FISCO BCOS single chain exceeds 10,000, second-level confirmation, high consistency and transactionality, and supports parallel expansion of parallel multi-chains. In terms of scalability and ease of use, FISCO BCOS 2.0 version has been released this year. The "one body, two wings and multiple engines" architecture scheme, one body refers to the group structure, which allows multiple different ledgers in the network. Each ledger is an independent group. Nodes can choose to join certain groups and participate in the consensus and consensus of this group of ledgers. Storage, as the number of groups increases, the throughput capacity of the system can be scaled out. The "two wings" refer to the parallel multi-chain processing model and distributed storage respectively. "Multi-engine" is the fusion of many functional components. This provides more platform support for the rapid application of the alliance chain.