Twenty-eight Chinese blockchain and Fintech companies have found a home at a newly-inaugurated blockchain incubation centre located in the Guangdong Financial High-tech Zone, CSDN reports.
The 120 000 square meter ‘”Blockchain + Financial Technology Professional Incubation Centre” will be located in former ‘Foshan Folk Finance Street’ facilities, and each of the projects will occupy a “station” there.
Centre coordinators will reportedly provide “comprehensive services” to entrepreneurial teams, including office space, “policy guidelines,” “project resource docking,” investment and finance.
Blockchain+ will also, “guide the mining of application scenarios and promote the transformation and application of technological achievements.”
According to CSDN:
“The closed-loop ecological incubation model creates an innovative and entrepreneurial ecosystem, and helps the incubation center to explore a number of ‘blockchain+’ application innovation projects, foster excellent ‘blockchain+’ financial technology talents, and guide excellent ‘blockchain+’ (projects).”
More specifically, the chairman of Antemi Holdings, Zhang Jinxi, announced his company had established a 200 million yuan ($29 million USD) private equity investment fund for ‘blockchain+’ financial technology.
Zhang also introduced an Antmi “‘teaching and hatching’…hatchery centre,” to be housed at the centre.
Projects at the incubator will start by, “…exploring the implementation of blockchain technology…(for) the financial technology industry,” and will move on to further incubate promising proposals.
Next, companies in the Zone will refine their findings with a, “…focus on the major needs and major pain points of the financial and physical industries.”
Pilot projects will then be initiated, “…to form a batch of application templates that can be replicated and promoted …(and)strive to build a foothold,” in the sector.
Also at the centre’s inaugural event, a ‘blockchain+’ Fintech investment alliance comprised of Antemi Holdings, Fufeng Investment, Shanshan Investment, Head Wolf Capital, Dreamcatcher Fund and Huangfeihong Venture Capital was formally announced.
Professor Zheng Zibin of Sun Yat-Sen University and a team working under Professor Lu Rongcong of the Chinese University of Hong Kong/ the Macau University of Science and Technology also announced a ‘blockchain+’ cooperative venture being undertaken by various universities in Guangdong, Hong Kong, and Macau.
Also attending the event were 11 teams that participated in a blockchain hackathon-style competition called “Light Lakes and Swords.”
The Antmi fund signed development deals with the top three finalists from that competition, the sixth of its kind and this year dedicated to blockchain- a type of distributed database tech that could solve problems in financial records management and payments.
All told, supporters of the new centre hope to develop an ‘international financial back-end base’ and ‘modern industrial financial centre ‘ at Guangdong, China’s biggest port and export region.
Project supporters also hope to, “…use blockchain as the entry point to integrate Big data, cloud computing, artificial intelligence and other technologies, (and) vigorously develop the financial technology industry, promote cross-border sharing of finance, technology and industry, and highly integrate and promote financial services to the real economy.”