Microsoft-Partnered Onchain Implements Blockchain Projects with Antshare Technology

Blockchain is booming in 2016. This previously rumored technology now all of a sudden became the key word among venture capitals and financials. Not long ago, U.S. blockchain firm Circle concluded its D-round at 60 million USD, once again, proving the capital magnetism of blockchain start-ups.

Founded in 2014, Antshare is one of the early Chinese non-profit community-driven blockchain projects. While the team behind Antshare set up Onchain as a company to promote and enrich Antshare ecosystem. Onchain also provides technological solutions for companies with its blockchain capability.

Antshare is a decentralized network protocol based on blockchain technology. It digitalizes real-world assets and equities, enabling registration, issuance, transfer, trading, clearance and settlement services via a p2p network. According to its founder, Mr. Da Hongfei, Antshare can be applied to equity ICO, P2P loan, digital asset management and smart contract, etc. When applied to equity ICO, start-ups could acquire value assessment and liquidity while users are granted with an exit mechanism. By registering equities on Antshare Blockchain, start-ups could be funded in a Blockchain ICO fashion.

When applied to P2P loan, online loan platforms may register the creditor rights on Antshare, making these rights transferable and tradable and hence increasing the liquidity. This also makes equities beyond the clientele of users of a single platform. Users may be assured to purchase long-term claims under high interest rates without worrying emergency monetization. With the Antshare trading and transferring functionalities, users may monetize their registered long-term claims whenever they want. Moreover, companies could issue their own bonds with Antshare.

In terms of employee holdings, Antshare was designed to provide flexible control over equities to client companies. Companies may limit that equities can only be held by certain employees, or set a cap of the percentage of equities transferable or tradable. For example, a company could set that an employee can only transfer his/her holdings of the company equities by 25% per year.

When it comes to smart contract, Antshare is different from payment systems like Bitcoin, but a blockchain-based digital contract system. Users sign the contract with their private keys thus concludes the transfer of digital assets. In fact, Antshare could be implemented on any kind of digital asset.

If the subject matter of the contract are digital assets already registered on Antshare blockchain, its delivery and execution will be programmed to automatically perform onchain. If the subject matter is offchain, the parties involved shall execute the contract on their own. Even in the latter scenario, Antshare is able to cut the red tape of signing and keeping large piles of paper contracts, ensuring enforceability with digital signatures.

During the development of blockchain or bitcoin, regulatory compliance has been always the unavoidable. To address this issue, Antshare has build-in KYC&AML APIs. Third-party payment providers and banks may use Antshare without legal issues. For the sake of missing private keys, Antshare has an Asset-Retrieving mechanism in place, that is, even if you lost your private key to a certain address, you could still retrieve it without resorting to a third party. In the end of October, 2015, Antshare concluded its ICO, raising 2,100 bitcoins within 10 days. After nearly 1 year, the long-expected second-round of Antshare crowd-funding is on the horizon. Da Hongfei told us that the second-round will be open on August, 8th to a global audience. Based on international practice, this round of crowd-funding of antshares accepts only bitcoins.