Xinyuan Real Estate Co., Ltd. (“Xinyuan” or the “Company”) (NYSE: XIN), an NYSE-listed real estate developer and property manager primarily in China and in other countries, has become one of the first blockchain technology service providers in China. The Company is accelerating its innovation to enable the real estate industry and to win market recognition with the X-Bolts blockchain underlying technology platform and key products such as Golden Bricks and Conbow.

Laying out the underlying technology of blockchain

After experiencing bubbles and troughs over the past two years, the blockchain industry has begun a new round of fast growth. If capital was the key driver for the development of the blockchain in the initial stage, then technical capability has become the core competitiveness of the blockchain in its next stage.

As one of the first real estate companies to invest in blockchain, Xinyuan’s technology business is one of the earliest developers in the underlying technology of the blockchain in China. As early as 2015, Xinyuan invested in Beijing Rchain to study the underlying technology of the blockchain, focusing on the BAAS (Blockchain As A Service) platform based on the blockchain technology, which is highly expandable, simple in process and self-controllable.

Rchain is one of the first five enterprises in China to pass the blockchain standard test by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology. The company participated in the preparation of the blockchain standard organized by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology in 2016, and led the preparation of the Legal Policy Research Report on the Application of Blockchain in the Financial Field, filling in the gap of legal policy support for blockchain application in the financial field.

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For Rchain, R&D capability and innovative application are the foundation that drive its growth. Its R&D team led the development of the X-bolt (Blockchain Operation Ledger Technology) Blockchain Bottom Closed Source Technology Platform. The technology was built with the technical support of IBM (China) Research Institute over three years.

As an underlying platform based on blockchain technology, all its underlying modules support pluggable customization, providing a variety of flexible access and deployment methods to meet the rapid access of blockchain systems under various scenarios.

The competition of technology is to some extent the competition of patents. Tencent’s newly released 2019 Tencent Blockchain White Paper showed that Internet companies, financial giants and start-ups are all fiercely competing in the patent field to protect their research results, improve their market competitiveness and enhance their brand reputation and credibility.

Patents are Rchain’s strength. In 2017, the number of blockchain patents held by Rchain ranked fifth in the world, and third in China. In 2018, it successfully entered the Top 20 list of Hurun blockchain enterprises and won the “Star of Blockchain” award by People.com.

Rchain has disclosed 57 patents related to blockchain as of October 31, 2019, and has 83 patent applications in the same period.

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Technology R&D and product innovation need high-end talent. In 2016, Xinyuan and Tsinghua PBC School of Finance (PBCSF) jointly established Xinyuan Real Estate Finance Science and Technology Research Center, whose main research areas include hot issues such as blockchain, big data, artificial intelligence and technology and finance. The center is committed to analyzing and mining the operation mechanism behind policies and data through objective and rigorous research, and at the same time cultivating management and professional talents in the field of financial science and technology to promote the development and innovation of financial technology.

Accelerating innovation to empower the real estate industry

After a period of dormancy, the application of blockchain technology in industrial fields is gradually maturing, including within the real estate industry.

The market prospects in the field of real estate intelligence and technology are huge. On the one hand, China has RMB300-400 trillion in housing stock assets that will need technology to aid revitalization in the future. On the other hand, technology can provide smart solutions for families, communities and even cities.

Some innovative enterprises have taken advantage of smart situations to explore new service scenarios, from residents to communities, from hardware to humanities, and to explore how to use science and technology to meet residents’ daily life, social, medical, educational, shopping and other needs more intimately and efficiently.

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Among the real estate innovators, Xinyuan, a NYSE-listed company established in 1997, has been at the forefront. As the founder of Xinyuan Group and one of the earliest entrepreneurs in China’s real estate industry, Xinyuan Chairman Zhang Yong has repeatedly stated that science and technology will change the profit model of the real estate industry and enable the real estate industry to transform and upgrade, and that the industrial Internet will redefine the living space for residents.

As the executor and pioneer of “science and technology + real estate” model, Xinyuan is taking the underlying technology of blockchain as the core, combining it with the characteristics of the market and industry, to develop applications suitable for real estate, including Golden Bricks and Conbow, two industrial applications based on blockchain technology.

For example, the traditional real estate sales process is lengthy, with many subjects, high cost and slow speed. Golden Bricks uses blockchain technology to solve this pain point, which not only reduces the selling cost of real estate enterprises and improves the sales speed, but also provides one-stop all-round service for buyers and improves customer satisfaction.

Taking property services as another example, traditional community property services have the characteristics of higher cost, narrow service scope, single source of income, etc.

To address these issues, Xinyuan has invested in Conbow to build an intelligent community operation platform with blockchain and the Internet of Things technology. This technology product can not only improve the living quality of owners and upgrade the quality of property services, but also reduce the cost of property management and increase the income of property service enterprises.

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In the future, the integrated application of blockchain technology will play an increasingly important role in industrial transformation. Creating social values and enabling the real economy are the general trends of the blockchain industry. Golden Bricks, Conbow and other applications that help lower costs and improve service efficiency will have massive potentials in the market.

The favorable macro environment also provides opportunities for the application of blockchain. Ren Zeping, Chief Economist & Director at Evergrande Think Tank, released the “Ren Zeping Blockchain Research Report” on October 26, predicting that the blockchain will develop faster and become more standardized in 3-5 years. According to the report, over 95% of blockchain related startups worldwide are currently in the seed round, angel round and round A, and only 3% in round B and beyond, which shows that the industry is still in the early stage. The report predicts that in the next 3-5 years, the application of the blockchain will focus on the financial industry and gradually spread to other real industries.

On October 28, Li Wei, Director of the Science and Technology Department of the People’s Bank of China, said at the first Bund Financial Summit that the blockchain, as an important emerging technology, has great potential in promoting the innovation and development of the digital economy and needs in-depth study.

For Xinyuan, the “X” in its “X-Bolt” technology represents “the future”. Sticking to its mission, Xinyuan will serve the real economy more efficiently with more cutting-edge technologies, more valuable applications.

The “tomorrow” of blockchain is not to be underestimated.

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