Beijing-based Red Date Technology, the developer behind China’s Blockchain-based Service Network (BSN), has closed a Series A round raising $30 million.
The firm said in an announcement on Thursday that the round was led by Kenetic Capital and Prosperity7, the diversified growth fund of Saudi energy giant Aramco’s venture arm.
Other participating investors include Swiss financial services giant Pictet Group, and Bangkok Bank, one of the largest banks in Thailand, the firm added.
Formally rolled out in April 2020, the BSN is a service infrastructure that allows developers to build decentralized applications on top of both public and permissioned blockchains that it supports, like Hyperledger Fabric, Ethereum, and Polkadot, among others.
The initiative is backed by the State Information Center of China, a think tank under the country’s cabinet-level economic planning agency, the National Development and Reform Commission. Red Date has been overseeing the development and operations of the platform.
By setting up cloud computing resources in advance, the BSN touts an ambition to reduce the costs and entry threshold for decentralized application development.
“Like the Internet in 1993, today’s fragmented blockchain industry is a patchwork of isolated chains and distributed ledgers,” said Yifan He, CEO of Red Date. “The Internet’s Golden Age was only made possible when the cost of building websites was reduced to near-zero.”
He said with the new equity financing, Red Date aims to increase its team to expand the global market of the BSN platform as it implements a dual governance model for its international and domestic Chinese networks.
Since the BSN’s infrastructure supports public blockchains, developers can only deal with the native cryptocurrencies such as ether on top of these public networks by using the BSN’s international platform.
The BSN’s Chinese domestic platform, on the other hand, has stripped off the gas fee token layer by replacing the crypto transactions with Chinese fiat yuan.