Frank Lu is Head of Ping An Blockchain Technology at OneConnect Smart Technology, a subsidiary of Ping An. Previously to Ping An, Frank Lu was one of the original founders of Hyperledger Fabric. In this podcast we discuss the different approaches to blockchain and the advantages of creating encrypted data networks for data privacy, cross validation of data and ability to run business logic on encrypted data.

 About Ping AnPing An is a Chinese holding conglomerate with 30 subsidiaries that mainly deal with insurance, banking, and financial services. The company was founded in 1988 and is headquartered in Shenzhen. "Ping An" literally means "safe and well".

Ping An ranked 7th on the Forbes Global 2000 list and 29th on the Fortune Global 500 list.

The company is considered to be China's biggest insurer, with US$107 billion in gross premium income in 2018. Its market capitalization is at US$220 billion in July 2019, making it the world's largest insurer except for Berkshire Hathaway.

Frank’s subsidiary, OneConnect Smart Technology, is mainly responsible for financial services. Frank heads the Technology Division for blockchain which is responsible for PingAn’s blockchain across the conglomerate.

 What is blockchain?Blockchain is a shared ledger technology which provides a single source of truth to all participants on a blockchain. It’s a way for different participants to be able to manage and work on the same data source. Every time a change is done to the data source, all participants will have visibility of that change. It has features which makes it immutable thus ensuring any attempts to delete a record or change a record will get noticed by the other participants.

 Frank’s journey to blockchainBack in 2013, Frank was part of the IBM WebSphere Strategy Team. His team was working on gamification technology which involved using coins and badges as game elements to motivate a workforce. In 2014, The project was pivoted to a mobile gaming backend as a service working for Jerry Cuomo.

At that time Ethereum hadn’t yet launched but had published the Ethereum whitepaper along with a few lines of code which attracted the interest of the team Frank worked at. They investigated the Ethereum whitepaper to determine how they could use it for their gaming backend work.

Based on the mobile gaming backend work a new project was launched, initially called “Blue Chain” that received $1m to explore blockchain solutions. John Wolpert was invited to lead Blue Chain and Richard Brownwas also invited to participate in the project.

Initially the plan was to avoid having to start from scratch in building a blockchain solution. They looked at the possibility of partnering with Ethereum to bring their technology to the enterprise market. However, due to internal politics it was decided for IBM to build their own blockchain solution. The Blue Chain initiative was then called Hyperledger Fabric. In December 2015, Hyperledger Fabric was formerly launched under the auspices of the Linux Foundation.

In early 2016, PingAn convinced Frank to join them.

 PingAn’s blockchain technologyAs head of blockchain technology at PingAn, Frank has an interesting view of consortiums. In his opinion consortiums are formed by entities who are interested in accessing other people’s data. Everybody wants to leverage other people’s data, however most aren’t willing to share their own data. His criticism of Hyperledger’s approach to blockchain is its use of channels which is essentially a point to point connection between counterparties, something which you can do with existing traditional technologies. Hyperledger’s approach is if you want to make confidentiality a priority then you should use blockchain technology.

PingAn has a different approach. Their blockchain technology is heavily based on cryptography where all data is encrypted on the blockchain and where the participants can run business logic on encrypted data.