Chinese Consortium Led by Huawei and Tencent to Launch Coinless Blockchain

The Chinese Financial Blockchain Shenzhen Consortium, led by multinational telecommunication company Huawei and tech giant Tencent, will soon present its coinless blockchain FISCO BCOS, as revealed in a press release Tuesday, Oct. 18.

FISCO consists of more than 100 financial entities including major players such as WeBank, a digital bank initiated by Tencent, and Shenzhen Securities Communication.

FISCO also claims its blockchain will use Byzantine fault tolerance protocol and also support Zero-knowledge proof.

The consortium stresses that the blockchain network will also contain "Observatory" nodes through which regulators and auditors would be able to monitor or access data whenever needed.

Huawei has previously worked on decentralized projects in collaboration with Hyperledger - an open source blockchain operation created by the Linux Foundation in 2015.

In March, Hyperledger launched its Caliper service - a blockchain benchmark tool allowing users to measure the performance of a specific blockchain implementation, with development contribution from Huawei.

In April, Huawei released its Blockchain-as-a-Service tool, based on the Hyperledger blockchain, that could help developers create and deploy services on Huawei Cloud.

Huawei announced the users of its mobile phone will be able to download Bitcoin wallets on their devices, with the wallets set to be pre-installed on all new Huawei smartphones.

Tencent has previously participated in the blockchain space as well.

In June, the tech giant partnered with Chinese officials to create the China Blockchain Security Alliance, which will consist of more than 20 public and private institutions - including government advisory agencies - and will develop secure mechanisms to deploy blockchain all over the country.