Alibaba’s Jack Ma says Blockchain Needs to Target Manufacturing Industry

According to the co-founder and chairman of Alibaba, Jack Ma blockchain technology, artificial intelligence (AI), and the Internet of Things (IoT) will become meaningless if they will not be able to target the manufacturing industry. During the World AI Conference 2018, billionaire Jack Ma expressed his views.

China alone has the manufacturing industry of over $3.1 trillion and other major economies such as the United States and India also operating the multi-trillion dollar manufacturing industry. Jack Ma believes blockchain, AI, and IoT must promote the transformation of the manufacturing sector and evolution of the society towards a greener and more inclusive tomorrow.

In the past decade especially in the last three years, smart manufacturing industry has grown at a rapid pace. Now the manufacturers are exploring new and innovative ways to reduce cost and improving efficiencies of manufacturing processes with emerging technologies. Now the manufacturing sector is moving towards automation and using robots to eliminate human errors, reduce cost, and speed up operations. Since the emergence of blockchain technology, various industries have applied the concept of decentralized systems. Companies are also using blockchain technology to rebuild supply chains.

In his speech, Jack Ma also said that blockchain, AI, and IoT can be the building blocks of the fourth industrial revolution. If we talk about the blockchain technology, in terms of adoption and scalability, it is still in its infancy. Right now public peer-to-peer networks can only handle 10 to 50 transactions per second. With the innovative consensus algorithms and second layer scaling solutions, scalability issue of blockchain technology can be addressed. When the blockchain technology will become scalable, it will become easy for the developers to create systems for the largest industries in the world such as manufacturing with the decentralized protocol.

Jack Ma believe if the blockchain technology is used at the large scale as a decentralized database and primary data processing technology by manufacturing companies then the blockchain technology will see a true mainstream adoption. Other than the financial sector, manufacturing can be a big target market for the emerging technologies. Though the technologies such as blockchain, AI, and IoT are used in the manufacturing sector to a certain extent their full potential still not utilized.

Ethereum based projects such as WaltonChain and VeChain and Proof of stake networks such as Cardano and EOS can help the developers to build blockchain applications which can help in promoting the transformation of the manufacturing industry.