Deep Sound Original · The author | Chen Wenqi
Pulling aside the fog, the true value of blockchain is becoming clearer.
This new technology that records and transmits trust is looking for anchors in more fields, using its "credibility, transparency and security" advantages to promote substantive solutions to various problems in urban life, smart government, social governance, financial transactions, and even the field.
In the cross-border mutual recognition scenario of health code, the data verification link of financial institutions, the field of judicial depository arbitration, etc., blockchain plays the role of infrastructure as the underlying technology, improving the efficiency of multi-party collaboration and reducing the cost of collaboration.
As we all know, the stage progress of technology and the real needs of application scenarios have always been two lines running forward, technology is too advanced, or the demand is too advanced, it is difficult to collide with substantial "progress", only when technology and application requirements intersect, the two will rub out the spark of value.
At present, under the trend of embracing digitalization in thousands of industries and the call of the community of human destiny, the development direction of ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance, environment, society and corporate governance), fairness and sustainable development is clearer and more important than ever. Fortunately, the characteristics of the blockchain to meet the needs, coupled with the progress of its own technology and the continuous precipitation of achievements, just in line with the changes in social needs have the same frequency resonance.
The demand is great, and the pain points are very painful
ESG is an imported product and evaluation system, although it started late in China, but it has developed rapidly. Practicing the concept of ESG development is conducive to promoting high-quality development, promoting common prosperity, developing the digital economy, bridging the "digital divide", achieving carbon peaking and carbon neutrality, and accelerating the realization of scientific and technological self-reliance and self-reliance, which is in line with the strategic goals of the national level.
More and more enterprises, organizations, institutions and other entities have also placed ESG in an important position. For example, in April 2021, Tencent incorporated "Promoting Sustainable Social Value Innovation" into its core development strategy and established the Sustainable Social Value Division (SSV), which also publishes ESG special reports every year. Alibaba announced last year that the ESG strategy became one of Alibaba's two social value strategies, and wrote the ESG progress into the financial report for the first time in the third quarter of fiscal 2022. ICBC has compiled and issued social responsibility reports for 15 consecutive years, and insisted on promoting the development of the real economy with green finance.
Everyone understands the truth, but ESG can't just be a slogan. I have to admit that in practice, the development of ESG is full of difficulties.
For example, ESG applications have challenges such as many participating roles, strong data sensitivity, large collection difficulties, high privacy requirements, and difficulty in ensuring data authority; ESG applications require to enhance the participation enthusiasm and governance functions of authoritative departments and stimulate more public participation, recognition and trust; ESG applications require penetrating supervision and transparent governance, and reduce compliance and audit risks...
The demand is great, and the pain points are very painful. This is where blockchain comes in: trusted data and privacy protection, trusted collaboration and incentives, trusted governance, and other advantages address the difficulties in the ESG field.
As the first Internet bank in China, WeBank saw the great value of blockchain in 2015, and then firmly chose the alliance chain that pursues bamboo forest symbiosis as the main technical route. At that time, public opinion's understanding of blockchain was still in its infancy, and industry exploration was more around the public chain. Starting from zero foundation, by 2016, weBank's blockchain architecture and design have been relatively formed, from the stage of 0 to 1.
According to Li Nanqing, president of WeBank, "WeBank and Golden Chain Alliance took the lead in completing the mission of the first phase in 2017, realizing the independent controllability of cutting-edge technologies such as blockchain... After leading the completion of the open source of FISCO BCOS, the underlying platform of the blockchain, WeBank continued to actively assume its role in the blockchain field and practiced the mission of the second phase, not only adhering to the direction of applying blockchain to industrial digitalization, adhering to financial technology, and helping the real economy of financial services. ”
Now, weCube blockchain has ushered in the third stage - to promote fairness and sustainable development, and become a trusted technical base for the whole society to practice ESG.
"Focusing on the future, as a key technology and application to transmit trust, WeBank Blockchain will start from a new perspective and will be committed to practicing the ESG concept, accelerating industrial digitalization, helping sustainable development, and building a trust base for the participation of the government, the public, enterprises and other parties in ESG's strategy." Li Nanqing said.
Accumulation and precipitation
Blockchain is essentially a multi-center database, referring to the technical scheme of collectively maintaining a reliable database through a multi-center approach. Its distinctive features are polycentric, non-tamperable, transparent and open, which means data consistency and security. For discrete data such as ESG information, blockchain technology can effectively collect, manage, and trace the source, reduce the cost of information circulation, and enhance the credibility of data. The technical characteristics of the blockchain also determine that it is not a tool used by a single enterprise, but should be jointly built by the industry and ecology.
The exploration process of WeBank Blockchain is actually a verification process of the blockchain technology route. Combing through the development of the past few years, WeBank blockchain has made three major decisions.
First, between the consortium chain and the public chain, the consortium chain is selected. Ma Zhitao, vice president and chief information officer of WeBank, revealed: "We have always believed that blockchain must be compliant and must meet the requirements of the current social system. The alliance chain has many natural advantages because it is relatively risk controllable and can be more efficient. ”
Second, between serving the real economy and the virtual economy, we have chosen to firmly serve the real economy. "We believe that technology ultimately helps entities demonstrate value." Ma Zhitao said: "We believe that the opportunities and potential of blockchain applications to serve the real economy are very huge. ”
Third, between win-win and monopoly, a win-win situation is chosen. This is in line with the distributed business model that WeHGnet has been advocating.
Under the combined efforts of these three choices, the concept of building a new data infrastructure for weCube blockchain in the era of digital economy has surfaced.
From the concept to the technology, the accumulation of WeBank in the blockchain can be summarized into two keywords - open source technology and open source ecology.
At the technical level, WeBank has realized the independent controllability of blockchain technology by leading the research and development of the blockchain underlying platform FISCO BCOS, which was open sourced in 2017 and introduced as the first domestic alliance chain underlying framework by BSN, a blockchain service network designed by the top level of the State Information Center in 2019.
At the ecological level, WeBank, together with more than 20 financial institutions and technology companies such as Tencent, Shenzhen Securities Connect and Shenzhen Fintech Association, jointly initiated the establishment of the Golden Chain Alliance (Shenzhen Financial Blockchain Development Promotion Association) and focused on building an open source ecosystem. So far, the open source ecosystem has gathered more than 100 member units of the Golden Chain Alliance, more than 3,000 enterprises and institutions, and more than 70,000 individual members, and has built one of the largest and most active domestic open source alliance chain ecosystems.
On this basis, WeBank has built a complete set of alliance chain full-stack core technology open source system covering the underlying layer, middleware and application components. Develop upper-level middleware platform WeBASE, entity authentication and trusted data exchange solution WeIdentity, distributed messaging collaboration solution WeEvent, cross-chain collaboration platform WeCross, alliance chain trusted oracle Truora, etc., so as to extend the technical capabilities to finance, medical, agriculture, education, Internet of Things, cultural copyright and other application fields.
Among them, the cross-border mutual recognition of Guangdong-Macao health code is a typical case of practicing the ESG concept, realizing interconnection and serving people's livelihood.
During the epidemic period, the social governance system is facing a test, how to support the exchange of residents between the two places, and ensure compliance with the requirements of relevant laws and regulations such as privacy protection? To this end, Based on physical identity and verifiable digital credential technology, WeBank Blockchain provides open source technical support for the project, so that institutions in the two places can verify the authenticity and validity of information without interconnection in the background.
According to statistics, at present, the cross-border mutual recognition of Guangdong-Macao health code has served hundreds of millions of people in Guangdong and Macao.
Carbon inclusion based on "goodness" is a model example of achieving ESG landing.
In 2020, WeBank, together with Beijing Green Exchange and Beijing Green Puhui Network Technology Co., Ltd., launched the first blockchain + green travel project "Green Travel Inclusive Platform". Individual green emission reduction behavior is quantified through emission reduction, and green energy and carbon credits are used to reward emission reduction users, and rewards can be used for public welfare and exchange for goods and services. This is one of the specific landing cases of WeBank's "goodness" social governance framework, exploring and promoting public green travel through a fair, open, transparent and credible mechanism.
WeBank proposed that the current mission of fintech has undergone phased changes, from improving efficiency to promoting fairness and sustainable development. Through the accumulation and precipitation of technology, ecology and concepts, WeBank has taken a variety of measures to promote the realization of national strategic goals such as "Xinchuang", "Double Carbon", "Rural Revitalization" and "Digital Economy", and actively move towards a new stage.
The future is here
With a foothold at the capability level and new opportunities brought about by the tide of the times, WeBank Blockchain has ushered in a new mission - to build an ESG trusted infrastructure to promote fairness and sustainability.
The question now facing The micro-blockchain is, the future has come, how can the new mission come true? Fan Ruibin, deputy general manager of the distributed business technology development department of WeBank and head of blockchain of WeBank, gave the answer of "2+2". That is, 2 foundations + 2 promotions, the former represents open source technology and open source ecology, and the latter represents the application in line with the ESG direction and the talents who serve the development of ESG.
The development process and status quo of the open source technology and open source ecology of the WeBank blockchain were mentioned above, but in order to support the development of ESG, the two need to be further tackled and deepened based on application practice.
For example, ESG is often a multi-party collaboration scenario, in the process of both transparency and credibility, but also need to protect many participants and trusted governance, but the current application is mostly isolated and fragmented. This requires accelerating the exploration of ESG applications by focusing on the development of distributed digital identity technologies to bring together scattered information to form a more complete view of information, and the application framework also needs to become more flexible and rich through technology integration.
In terms of open source ecology, in order to maintain vitality, the participating roles should be able to obtain their own needs and play a unique value in combination with their advantages. According to Fan Ruibin, WeBank will carry out more ESG-related ecological work next, such as holding a series of ESG application competitions and salons, so that more people can learn and participate in ESG, and develop more certified partners.
On the one hand, it is to expand the "circle of friends", on the other hand, it is to fully mobilize the enthusiasm of participants. The ultimate purpose of developing technology and ecology is to promote more applications and maximize the value of blockchain.
Specifically, the combination of blockchain and ESG is not abstract. For example, in the field of rural revitalization, blockchain combines 5G and the Internet of Things to build a traceability platform, which can not only promote trust between consumers and agricultural products, but also promote trust between partners of agricultural enterprises and financial institutions.
For example, West Lake Longjing is a famous tea that everyone knows, but its production is very small, Longjing tea production area has 1.1 million mu, while West Lake Longjing only accounts for about 2%. When consumers buy tea, is it true that what they buy is true?
Hangzhou West Lake Longjing Tea Company adopted the WeChat blockchain to make a digital tea garden, and built the West Lake Longjing "Tribute Pai" blockchain traceability platform. The blockchain itself has the characteristics of immutable, traceable and verifiable, which is highly consistent with the source quality assurance system of West Lake Longjing tea, and realizes the whole process of tea from production to sales through the picking, frying, processing, processing, packaging, logistics and other links of West Lake Longjing tea.
Digital tea garden installed monitoring system, soil moisture supervision system, temperature and humidity supervision system and other systems, consumers as long as the scan of the two-dimensional code, you can watch the tea garden, and even see the tea pruning time, picking time, pickers, processors, trust problems are solved.
Blockchain technology still has a lot of room for horizontal and vertical expansion and deepening in the field of ESG applications, but all the work still needs to be done by people. "Talent cultivation is a long cycle of work, and it may be difficult to see obvious results in a short period of time, but it is a very important basic work for the long-term sustainable development of an industry." Fan Ruibin said.
Therefore, WeBank has focused on investing and building a blockchain talent cultivation system, and jointly with training institutions, examination centers, certification agencies and other roles, covering teaching, certification and practice, continuously injecting new blood into the industry.
In February this year, the search volume of the keyword "ESG" in google search engine reached an all-time high, and the task of carbon neutrality and carbon peaking in China was urgent and arduous, and enterprises, organizations and other entities shifted from "efficiency first" to taking into account efficiency and fairness. The future is big, and the road to the future is bumpy. What WeBank Blockchain has to face is both a vast ocean and a turbulent ocean.
Looking back at the deep winter of 2015, when the micro-blockchain quietly sprouted, they most likely did not expect that they would trek hard in no man's land, nor could they imagine that in a few years, they would be given such an important historical mission by the times and society.
After several years of muffled accumulation and exploration, the micro-blockchain is now standing in front of a new crossroads, and they have made a choice.