A new remittance program using blockchain technology demonstrates China’s increasing enthusiasm towards the nascent tech.
During the past few years, China has quickly established itself as one of the most cash-independent societies in the world. People in China can pay for products easily from their phones, using the popular app WeChat, or the payment service provided by Alibaba, called Alipay.
Today, cnLedger, the same twitter account that publicized China’s crypto project rankings, announced that Alipay had successfully developed and used it’s “first blockchain-based electronic wallet cross border remittance service” in a cross-border transaction between Hong Kong and the Philippines. The transaction took 3 seconds.
Jack Ma: Using blockchain to achieve cross-border remittances is one of my most concerned projects in the past six months. Starting from Hong Kong, this service (AlipayHK) will be brought to the rest of the world in the future.
— cnLedger [Not giving away ETH] (@cnLedger) June 25, 2018
The new remittance service allows users of AlipayHK (Alipay Hong Kong) to send money to users of a payment service in the Philipines called Gcash. Alipay plans to expand their services in the future to more people and payment mediums.
Jack Ma is the CEO of Alipay. Like most of China, he is not a fan of cryptocurrencies, but is a fan of blockchain. “Blockchain is not a bubble, but Bitcoin is a bubble,” Ma told the World Intelligence Congress last month.
Regardless of the current stance on cryptocurrency, it is great to see that Alipay is continuing to demonstrate their interest in blockchain technology.
