China’s Antshares raises $4.5m, building ‘universal blockchain’ framework

Shanghai-based open-source blockchain project Antshares has raised more than US$4.5 million in a crowdsale to complete building out its innovative blockchain under an “Onchain universal blockchain” framework, which will digitize, record and track physical goods and assets, ranging from real estate titles to corporate equity, from supply chain assets to creditors’ claims, said a project press release CoinReport received.

“Our vision is to make Onchain a truly universal Blockchain framework,” said Da Hongfei, founder and CEO of Onchain and creator of Antshares, in the press release. “Utilizing different plug-in modules, our framework could be applied for a public chain, a consortium chain or even a private chain. Our cross-chain adaptor module, currently under development, creates interoperability among these different chains.”

According to the release, Antshares incorporates a number of firsts:

• First organic Chinese blockchain project to work with both Microsoft Azure and the Hyperledger Project.
• First significant Chinese ICO (6119.53 BTC raised in its August/September crowdsale), with more than 50 percent of the participants from outside of China.
• First open-source blockchain project developed in China.

Hongfei said since the end of the ICO, the Antshares team has been busy readying its wallets (in both Chinese and English) and mainnet for global release, which will take place by October’s end. The team is also developing its web wallet and mobile wallet (iOS, Android and WP), which will be released at the same time as the mainnet, said the release.

For its leadership and innovation, Onchain, an open-source “universal blockchain” platform, incorporating a framework which allows public, permissioned (consortium) or private blockchains, and will eventually allow interoperability among these modes, recently received the Award for Excellence in Innovation in Blockchain Technology from Frost & Sullivan, and was also named a KPMG China Leading Fintech 50 selection.

Image via the press release