Alibaba’s Ant Group Plans to Stockpile Blockchain Talent ‘for 20 Years’

Alibaba’s Ant Group is continuing its relentless blockchain drive with a move that could see it recruit some of the world’s top young blockchain talents over the next two decades.

Per a report from Jiemian, the Ant Group’s Ant Blockchain subsidiary has launched a long-term recruitment plan that would involve working with “global universities,” as well as top domestic tech universities.

The plan will see the Hangzhou-based company recruit an “unspecified” number of blockchain-trained people, focusing on talent pools at IT colleges.

The company added that its goal is to set up a technical team that will last it “the next 20 years,” and also plans to invest funds in research and development in “core blockchain technologies,” such as distributed ledger advances, asymmetric cryptography and consensus mechanisms.

The report makes mention the fact that Ant will likely want to target America’s top tech university, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Several leading Chinese universities are also in Ant’s sights, including Shanghai Jiaotong University, the East China Normal University and Sun Yat-sen University.

The move comes just days after Ant sealed a deal with domestic shipping giant COSCO, with the former now set to help the shipping firm adopt blockchain technology in its operations.

Ant operates the Alipay e-pay solution, which – along with rival Tencent’s WeChat Pay – accounts for 15% of the entire Chinese payments market.

Experts believe that Alipay and WeChat Pay could be used to help the central People’s Bank of China distribute the nation’s forthcoming digital yuan.
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