China’s Largest Real Estate Developer Launches Blockchain Solution

Dalian Wanda, China’s largest real estate developer with an annual revenue of around $40 billion, announced the launch of a blockchain solution called “Hercules,” which was developed in cooperation with major software company Cloudera.

Since early 2016, Cloudera has expressed its optimism towards the blockchain technology and its potential in the big data market. On November 23, just weeks before the launch of the Wanda-Cloudera joint blockchain project Hercules, Mihaela Risca, a financial services officer at Cloudera, released a blog post entitled “Blockchain in Financial Services — Hype or Reality?”

The blog, which focused on the implementation and utilization of the blockchain technology within the big data market, included information provided by Cloudera core engineer Joao Salcedo, who designed and implemented big data solutions with Cloudera over the past three years.

Salcedo wrote:

“As big data allows the predictive modeling of more and more processes of reality, blockchain technology could help turn prediction into action. Blockchain technology could be joined with big data, layered onto the reactive-to-predictive transformation, which means analysis can help developers quantify the risks and benefits of modifications to the blockchain protocol, as well as monitor for troublesome behavior.”

Exactly 13 days after the release of Salcedo and Risca’s papers, Cloudera secured a major partnership with Wanda, a company that is projecting a $200 billion market cap by the end of 2020.

Together, the two companies will continue the development of Hercules while attempting to integrate and distribute their blockchain solution to a wide range of industries. As Salcedo emphasized, Wanda and Cloudera are focusing on distributing their blockchain system to industries and companies that are heavily reliant on big data and information technology.

According to a local publication called Fenghuang Wang, a Wanda group spokesperson stated:

“…the industry’s demand for large data and blockchain technology demand is ever more popular, but the market does not have a one-stop open source suite which can support a complete business needs… The Project Hercules project is designed to make it easier for organizations to deploy and manage blockchain applications on existing large data clusters.”

Upon the announcement of the release of Hercules, the Wanda group spokesperson did not specify whether the company itself will adopt the technology and integrate Hercules onto its existing systems. However, Fenghuang Wang suggests that the Wanda Financial Group will most likely utilize the blockchain solution to facilitate payments and financial information for its large user base.

While the Wanda group is yet to release more information in regards to Hercules, the Cloudera team stated that it is focused on utilizing big data for automatic execution of smart contracts and transaction analysis. Risca provided the following infographic to demonstrate how big data can rely on secure and unalterable blockchain data for information processing.

Currently, the big data industry is valued at $1.5 billion, with multi-billion dollar corporations such as Tencent and Baidu leading China’s big data market.

Over time, as the blockchain technology gains international acceptance and sees a higher implementation rate across Asia, Wanda and Cloudera hope to integrate Hercules and other future blockchain solutions to big data market leaders in China.