Bitcoin Daily: Ant Financial Rolls Out OpenChain; Bitcoin Firm Purse Plans To Close

Ant Financial rolled out a blockchain platform called OpenChain, which lets small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) and developers harness its proprietary blockchain technologies, according to an announcement.

The technology offers many modules to developers that they can use in different mixes to create trust in team efforts. It can help with areas like product provenance, supply chain finance, charitable contributions and eInvoices. According to the announcement, “This helps to greatly reduce development and deployment costs for [SMBs] and developers, allowing them to focus on product and service delivery.”

Jin Ge, general manager of Blockchain Platforms at Ant Financial, said in the announcement, “Applications of blockchain technology have ballooned over the past few years. Through the launch of the OpenChain platform, we aim to help 1 million [SMBs] and developers innovate and explore more use cases in the next three years.”

The company said that the Ant Financial blockchain is China’s biggest productivity blockchain platform. It can process as well as support 1 billion user accounts and 1 billion transactions daily.

In other news, Purse, a bitcoin startup, plans to close following a run that lasted for six years, CoinDesk reported.

The company provided discounts as high as 5 percent at Amazon by linking holders of Amazon gift cards with digital currency investors. Users could buy gift cards at reduced prices with bitcoin or bitcoin cash.

An email sent to customers said, per the outlet, “We’ve made the very difficult decision to dissolve the company. We’re grateful for the opportunity afforded by our supporters to build products and infrastructure for the cryptocurrency community.”

Purse will reportedly keep facilitating services up to June 26. Signups, however, were to reportedly stop Thursday (April 16). Its “Shop and Earn” feature will also be taken down on April 23, while open orders that haven’t be matched will be called off.