Alibaba’s Blockchain Team Raises Over $20 Million From Institutional Investors

A public blockchain project founded by the former head of Alibaba’s blockchain team has raised over $20 million from institutional investors in a combined token and equity sale.

Called Ultrain, the startup recently announced that important investors in the round included token funds, such as Draper Dragon, FBG Capital, DanHua VC and Arrington XRP Capital and blockchain industry startups (crypto wallet Bixin and exchange OKCoin). Also, Old-style VC funds such as Morningside Capital and Ceyuan Capital took part.

Ultrain was launched in October 2017, it was created by a group of Alibaba staffers. The assignment’s chief executive, Ray Guo, was in charge of security policy and data security as the former technical director of the Alibaba Group’s security unit.

According to the company with the new funding, it will focus on the technological development of its public blockchain protocol known as Ultrain that is considered as an accessible platform for authorizing decentralized applications (dapps).

In 2017, the platform launched a test version of its system which was appealed to develop 2,000 transactions per second (TPS) on a network with more than 2,000 nodes hosted on Alibaba cloud servers.

According to Ray Guo, public blockchain projects must concentrate on the actual requirements of users. Besides, concentrating on TPS, adding that 2,000 TPS would be sufficient for the time being

As per the team of Alibaba Alipay which has more than 200 million day-to-day active users, its highest TPS on normal days is around 6,000. Having more than 80 blockchain-related patents so far, pushing forward blockchain applications at Alibaba is not as simple as it may see.

An important part of this approach is strong control over the partners within the ecosystem and it is a centralized way of thinking. Alibaba’s strategy is to shape an ecosystem around itself, a spokesperson said to Coin Desk.