A unit of Ant Group Co. is quietly making inroads to link over 60 billion yuan ($8.4 billion) worth of energy infrastructure and other real-world power assets to its blockchain, according to people familiar with the matter. Ant Digital Technologies, the enterprise solutions arm of the Jack Ma-backed fintech giant, has been tracking the power output and potential outages of some 15 million new energy devices including wind turbines and solar panels in China, and uploading the data to its blockchain, which is known as AntChain. The next step is to issue tokens linked to those assets, and some of that has already begun. The firm has so far completed financing for three clean energy projects using this approach, raising about 300 million yuan in total for the companies that operate them. Tokenization of real-world assets is still at an early stage. “When you tokenize stuff, there’s trust involved; we need to know as a token holder that the company actually has the so-called collateral,” said Campbell R. Harvey, a professor of finance at Duke University. The development can “be a good thing because once it’s tokenized, then we can do transactions very efficiently, quickly at low cost.”

Full report : Ant Group’s Ant Digital Technologies is quietly working to link ~$8.4B of energy infrastructure and other real-world assets to its AntChain blockchain.