Fortune 500 firm Geely to launch joint blockchain venture in China

Swiss enterprise blockchain developer, the Concordium Foundation, has signed a joint venture agreement with the $200 billion Chinese conglomerate, Geely Holding Group — the largest shareholder in Volvo and a Fortune Global 500 company.  

The joint venture will be 80% owned by Geely and 20% owned by Concordium, but operationally co-managed by both companies. The venture aims to provide Chinese businesses and clients with access to new blockchain platform-based business models and decentralized applications, or DApps, which can be deployed across various industries.

As previously reported, Concordium is a public and permissionless layer 1 blockchain with a user-identification layer at the protocol level that is protected by zero-knowledge proofs. While this supports encrypted transfers and privacy between users, a feature of Concordium is also the provision of a set of on-chain anonymity revokers, which can enable a government to deanonymize users upon request. 

The existence of this feature means that Concordium's use is tailored for companies that need to be able to operate legally in tightly regulated environments — a balancing act between privacy and compliance. Speaking to Cointelegraph, Concordium chief marketing officer Beni Issembert explained:

“The enterprise and business world finds it hard to embrace technologies with no privacy orientation, which is why at Concordium we have developed an open and permissionless technology that can adapt to the enterprise needs while allowing the user to maintain its privacy as long as he's not a bad actor.”

Concordium's leading executives and board members hail from corporations that include Volvo, Ikea, Saxo Bank, Mastercard and others, providing a set of industry connections that can foster early projects, partnerships and use cases for the blockchain protocol.

Subject to regulatory approval, Concordium and Geely's joint business is expected to be operational this year and will focus its energies on helping enterprise clients to implement new technologies related to digital identity, regtech and privacy enhancement technologies.

The joint venture will also cooperate with a fintech-focused company called Genius & Guru, wholly owned by Geely, which has already invested in financial institutions and fintechs based in Chinese cities such as Beijing and Shanghai, as well as in Copenhagen, Denmark.

In a statement, Daniel Donghui Li, the CEO of Zhejiang Geely Holding Group, said that he believes using Concordium's blockchain technology will help to set industry standards in the Chinese market and provide a sophisticated infrastructure for various blockchain applications:

"By joining forces in China we will apply and develop this technology further and explore pathways to build a leading blockchain industry ecology to reduce the cost of trust and provide companies with access to a platform with the tools they need to develop blockchain-based applications together."