China’s top digital bank, WeBank, has partnered with OpenNodes, a distributed ledger technology platform by Singapore’s Infocomm Media Development Authority.

Through the new partnership, WeBank will provide the FISCO BCOS blockchain platform to Singaporean academics to innovate and build on.

The initiative seeks to offer the blockchain platform as an “innovation playground“ to Singapore’s student communities to expedite development in the field of DLT.

As a requirement of participation in the program, all innovations produced through the FISCO BCOS initiative are made available as open-source.

The program hopes to stimulate research into blockchain applications for the supply chain and finance sectors. 

WeBank to support DLT development in Singapore

Students from Singapore University of Technology and Design, Nanyang Technological University and Singapore Management University are expected to participate in building with the FISCO BCOS platform. 

“We seek to spur the next-generation talents into building viable solutions using blockchain to serve the general public,” said WeBank's executive vice president and chief information officer, Henry Ma.

“Providing this open-source technology as a developer arena will also help us strengthen the stack of our technologies in the process while allowing for better products and services for the general public,” he added.

WeBank and OpenNodes will host workshops and hackathons to drive awareness and engagement with the platform and support development from the initiative.

WeBank to integrate DAML onto FISCO BCOS

FISCO BCOS is an open-source blockchain platform developed by the nonprofit Financial Blockchain Shenzhen Consortium, otherwise known as FISCO, to foster DLT research and innovation through collaboration.

The platform’s development saw contributions from 20 top Chinese financial technology firms and was established during 2016, before being open-sourced the following year. Since launching, FISCO’s membership has grown to over 100, including leading firms Tencent, Huawei and WeBank. 

Last month, WeBank announced it would integrate the digital asset smart contract language DAML with the FISCO BCOS platform. 

The FISCO BCOS platform was used as the open-source basis from which China’s Blockchain Service Network was developed.