Editor | Nina Bambysheva, Michael Delcastillo
Cryptographic currency has overturned. Even though it rose by a third or more in the market rebound in January, in the past 12 months, the cryptocurrency market still fell by 38%, evaporating about $630 billion in wealth. Some by-products that were popular in this market, such as NFT digital collections, performed even worse. The true face of a famous prophet in this field like Sam Bankman-Fried has been exposed, which is at best incompetent and at worst criminal.
Despite this, dozens of companies around the world are still quietly investing in blockchain, because this distributed database technology supports the whole industry. Most of these listed companies are big companies, and most of them are smart companies. They are not wasting money. They do this because the blockchain can help their enterprises operate better, faster or cheaper.
Cryptographic currency is in crisis, but many of the world’s largest financial institutions are still pinning their hopes on this basic technology as the best way to build confidence with customers-and each other.
In the cover story of this year’s Forbes Top 50 Blockchain, Michael Miebach, CEO of Mastercard, the world’s second largest payment company, said: "New payment technologies will always appear. The first card that appeared was the information transmission technology using ISO 8583(ISO number refers to international standard), which has a history of 50 years, then the real-time payment using ISO 20022, and then the blockchain appeared. Some people will say, well, what problems can it solve? But the fact is that the blockchain can solve many real-life problems. "
At the end of January this year, 55-year-old Mibach told analysts and shareholders that his company had "tokenized" transactions more than 2 billion times a month, an increase of 38% in one year, and MasterCard was realizing digital payment in 110 countries, the biggest advantage of which was to reduce fraud.
Nowadays, the token of MasterCard means that in every transaction, the 16-digit number on the plastic credit card will be replaced by a super-safe unique digital record, without leaving your identity in the form of a credit card number. It also allows customers to use digital wallets. Although the wallet is not on the blockchain yet, MasterCard is currently working with banks and merchants to tokenize various assets, including deposits, and track them on multiple public and private blockchain.
"You can tokenize anything." Mibach said, "I think we will have a new world where everything will be tokenized and delivered in a safe way."
Mibach also believes that the recent difficulties of cryptocurrency may actually accelerate the adoption of this new technology. He said: "This will allow more mainstream players to participate, and regulators will also come forward to solve the risks. This is the secret of making it a mainstream technology. I think that the recent winter storm (cryptocurrency) will help the adoption of this technology. "
MasterCard is one of the 22 financial companies that entered Forbes’ list of the top 50 global blockchain in 2023. These companies are all large enterprises that put distributed ledger technology into practical use. MasterCard is also a typical business middleman. Last year, the company earned $22 billion in revenue and $10 billion in profits by charging financial institutions (basically helping customers spend their own money). In other words, MasterCard is the kind of company that cryptocurrency enthusiasts love and hate, but it has been trusted by millions of businesses around the world.
After scandals, scams and frauds, trust is exactly what this industry needs. Blue-chip financial giants who smell the opportunity, such as listed companies such as BlackRock, JPMorgan Chase and Fidelity, have become some of the biggest advocates of this new technology.
This year, a total of six China enterprises were concerned by the Forbes list of the top 50 blockchain companies because of their outstanding achievements in the blockchain field:
- Ant Group, Hangzhou, China
This huge financial technology company has an exclusive blockchain running more than 50 applications. One of the projects, called "Treasure Project", helps museums and galleries to promote their collections by making and distributing replicas of China’s ancient cultural relics in the form of digital collections similar to NFT. In addition, Ant Group has also developed an engine, which is said to store blockchain data 15 times more efficiently than mainstream providers. Topnod, a digital collection platform owned by Ant Group, has already used this engine and has saved 75% of storage costs.
Main leaders: Jiang Guofei, vice president of Ant Group and president of digital technology business group.
- Baidu, Beijing, China
Baidu’s new blockchain platform, XuperAsset, has helped more than 400 companies issue digital collections, namely NFT in China. However, since cryptocurrency transactions are illegal in China, these non-homogeneous assets have different names in China, and resale is prohibited. In the past 12 months, the platform has generated nearly 1 million copyrighted goods, most of which are works of art and videos, and brought about $35 million to Baidu. In addition to these NFTs whose names are not NFT, more than 30,000 blockchain developers around the world are using Baidu’s open source code.
Main leader: Xiao Wei, general manager of Baidu blockchain.
- China Construction Bank, Beijing, China
The world’s second largest bank by assets is using blockchain to connect lenders with investors. China Construction Bank recently launched a huge distributed ledger for credit reporting, which allows bank subsidiaries to share information in compliance with government privacy regulations. So far, the company has used blockchain to issue 4.2 billion US dollars of credit to 2 million customers, and it is expected to cover 700 million people by mid-2025.
Main Leader: Tan Hao, Vice President of Jianxin Jinke, China Construction Bank.
- Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, Beijing, China
This $5 trillion bank has launched or is developing more than 100 blockchain products, but its work in digital currency, China, that is, RMB smart contracts has attracted much attention because of its way to help protect customers’ digital trading funds. For example, a villager in Chengdu can receive his digital RMB payment through a smart contract, which will ensure that the payment will be in place after he completes the quota for planting trees.
Main leader: Liu Chaowei, head of the blockchain research team of China Industrial and Commercial Bank.
- Tencent, Shenzhen, China
The parent company of China’s ubiquitous social platform WeChat is using blockchain technology to help China enterprises cut costs and promote business. By using Tencent’s software, thousands of China companies have been able to speed up the customs clearance of their products by 50%. In addition, about 400 million users in more than ten cities in China use Tencent’s blockchain service to pay taxes, settle medical expenses and even handle donations.
Main leader: Li Li, general manager of Tencent Cloud blockchain.
- Weizhong Bank, Shenzhen, China
In order to handle loans, banks usually require customers to provide a large number of documents, including property rights and credit reports. This is a pain point in the financial field. However, Weizhong Bank launched a new information verification platform in April last year, which can connect notary offices and borrowers through a blockchain-based network, thus speeding up and improving the loan application process. So far, it has about 2.5 million users. After the launch of the platform, the pass rate of online car loans applied by car buyers has increased from 20% to 80%.
Main Leader: Ma Zhitao, Vice President and Chief Information Officer of Weizhong Bank.
The following is a complete list of Forbes’ top 50 blockchain in 2023:
This article is partially translated from https://www.forbes.com/sites/ninabambysheva/2023/02/07/Forbes-blockchain-50-2023/? sh=2aff7009319d
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