Ant Group, which is still undergoing a restructuring after regulators blocked its initial public offering in 2020, unveiled a blockchain storage engine on Thursday as the fintech giant signals a pivot towards hard tech, reports the South China Morning Post. The Ant Group Digital Technologies unit unveiled Letus, or Log-structured Efficient Trusted Universal Storage, at the Apsara Conference in Hangzhou, describing it as a way to lower the storage costs of blockchain networks, according to a press release on Thursday.
“Letus can improve storage throughput by 15 times, reduce latency by 90%, and save disk bandwidth and space usage by 95% and 60% [respectively],” said Yan Ying, technical director of AntChain, in the release.
The company also released updated versions of various “platform-as-a-service” products at the event, however Ant – which still runs the country’s most dominant mobile payment services app—revealed little new on the financial services side of its operations.