Ether has rallied 76 percent over the past month, bringing its gains since January to 1,000 percent. The surge follows announcements this week from Chinese entities exploring Ethereum applications. A
Ether has rallied 76 percent over the past month, bringing its gains since January to 1,000 percent. The surge follows announcements this week from Chinese entities exploring Ethereum applications.
Andrew Keys, global business development head at ConsenSys, says the Royal Chinese Mint is developing a digital version of the yuan on Ethereum. The effort involves testing the ERC-20 token standard and smart contracts. Singapore's Monetary Authority pursued the same path, partnering with the R3 banking consortium and local banks to develop a digital version of the Singapore dollar for settlement between institutions. The trial wrapped up in March, with further testing ahead.
Ant Financial, Alibaba's financial services unit, is running Ethereum experiments to upgrade its payment infrastructure. The company operates Alipay, the Zhima Credit scoring system, MYbank, and several other financial products. During its last funding round in April 2016, the firm was valued at $60 billion. Leadership is weighing a Hong Kong IPO later this year.
Chinese institutions are advancing other Ethereum projects. Peking University is establishing a lab dedicated to Ethereum research, focusing on protocol improvements and applications in supply chain and energy markets across China. Dianrong, a leading peer-to-peer lender, began blockchain research in 2015 and is exploring next-generation solutions built on Ethereum, having open-sourced its own permissioned Ethereum version called DChain. iPayNow, which handles payments for JD.com, Xiaomi, and Baidu, is building with Quorum, the privacy-enabled Ethereum variant that JP Morgan released.
Companies across oil and gas, finance, and software formed the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance in February to develop business-ready Ethereum applications.
Ethereum is a decentralized platform where developers deploy smart contracts, programs that execute actions when conditions are met. Ether, the network's native currency, is the second-largest cryptocurrency by market value, with a capitalization exceeding $8 billion.
