Blockchain becomes a hot topic these days in science and technology industry, several giants have made their voices heard. Alibababa Group, the largest e-commerce merchant in China, also shows their interest in this advanced fintech. According to a social recruitment, the technology department of Alibababa Group’s Taobao is hiring blockchain experts. Obviously, Alibaba is also stepping up their research on blockchain technology.

According to the job description, the blockchain experts they are looking for should be responsible for the analysis and the design parts of blockchain business; design and develop the core function code of a blockchain system; take part in formulation of the integrated scheme of blockchain framework and the group’s existing technology system; blockchain experts also need to formulate relevant blockchain business solutions, promote and assist partners to complete the project and take part in governance of the technological structural of Taobao.

The recruitment shows Taobao desire to get blockchain experts with experience of open source blockchain projects, such as IBM Hyperledge and Ethereum. They also willing to poach talents directly from some technology giants, such as IBM.

Actually, in July 2016, Ant Financial, Alibaba’s payment affiliate and the operator of online payment platform Alipay, launched a blockchain-powered charity platform called Ant Love. Cheng Li, CTO of Ant Financial first announced their future-oriented “BASIC” technical strategy, with “B” standing for “blockchain” in the Ant Financial Economic Conference (ATEC) three months ago. Ant Financial Technology Lab also announced they plan to use blockchain technology to support the traceability of imported food safety and merchandise anti-counterfeiting.

Recently, Alibaba was reported that they have completed the registration process for its“P2P nodes” platform. However, according to a statement made by Alibaba last week, this P2P nodes platform is working for Alibaba’s CDN (Content Delivery Network) business which based on P2P technology and has absolutely nothing to do with the “mining platform” and “virtual currency”. Ali Cloud also clarified they will neither launch Any “bitcoin-like” virtual currencies nor provide any so-called “mining platform.”

In addition to Alibaba, Tencent and Baidu also put lots of effort into blockchain.

Tencent, a Chinese conglomerate has registered a blockchain-related trademark for their “Ether Lock” and “Ethernet Lock”. Tencent also launched their “Blockchain Solutions White Paper” in April 2017.

Baidu, the searching engine giant in China has launched its “BaaS” (blockchain-as-a-service) open platform to help more enterprises building their own blockchain network platform. According to Baidu Finance, this platform was launched on July 21, 2017 and has supported over 50 billion yuan of assets.