Mobile Phone Retailer Joins China's Blockchain Land Grab With US Startup Investment

Published on by Coindesk | Published on

Dixintong Technology Group, whose parent company, D.Phone, is one of the largest smartphone retailers in China, has entered the blockchain space by acquiring a minority stake in a U.S. startup called Monsoon Blockchain.

People familiar with the matter said the deal values the blockchain startup at over $100 million.

The partnership between the two companies comes at a time when China is encouraging enterprise blockchain adoption as well as the development of emerging technologies.

The country's two largest telecommunications services providers, China Mobile and China Telecom, are members of a consortium that runs Blockchain-Based Service Network, a state-backed blockchain infrastructure project.

The Shanghai government plans to spend millions of dollars on supporting a public blockchain project and open an incubation center for startups that want to build decentralized applications on the blockchain.

Top Chinese tech giants such as Alibaba and Baidu have also launched their own projects to integrate blockchain with cloud services.

Monsoon Blockchain touts an ethereum-based protocol that aims to use smart contracts to provide a more efficient marketplace for cloud service providers and potential clients, according to Basile.

Monsoon Blockchain worked with a spate of IT giants including IBM, Oracle and Alibaba as a data services distributor, said Basile, who previously headed Fusion-io and Violin Memory, both of which are data processing software and hardware providers.

While Monsoon Blockchain primarily serves enterprise clients, the deal with Dixintong could boost a consumer-oriented business, potentially bringing users onto its blockchain protocol.

Basile said the partnership with Dixintong would give Monsoon the access to billions of users in China to reach a larger scale, which would be otherwise impossible in the U.S.He said Monsoon could assign a unique identity to each smartphone user on its blockchain platform where they can enjoy cheaper data services thanks to its optimized cloud services solution.

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