Competing for traffic, resources, and technology, has BaaS become a game for giants?

, reprinted by Odaily with authorization.

When it was released, it was vigorous and vigorous, and when it was hung up, there was no sound.

This is the true state of the BaaS platform.

After all, it has been 9102 years now, and it is not easy to shout the slogan the first year of blockchain XX, and practitioners need to show their real skills.

Therefore, Babbitt is also struggling to find the correct posture for the blockchain to land.

When Babbitt learned about these BaaS platforms step by step with great excitement, he gradually discovered that the BaaS landing still did not escape the fate of the press conference was cool for a while, and the landing was full of tears.

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There are more than 60 BaaS platforms, and various roles participate in the competition

According to the data collected by qkl123, there are currently more than 60 BaaS platforms at home and abroad. The following is an excerpt of some domestic BaaS platforms, with as many as 30.

As can be seen from the above table, entrepreneurs in China have been aiming at the direction of BaaS as early as 2016, and the concept of BaaS was first proposed in the world in 2015, which shows the technical acumen of Chinese people.

From 2016 to 2017, there were not many BaaS platforms in China. In 2018, there was a blowout. The number of newly released BaaS platforms in that year was more than the sum of the previous two years.

1/3 of 2019 has passed, but according to Babbitts understanding, there is only one project that announced the launch of a new BaaS platform this year.

Does this indicate that the BaaS market is saturated?

The market prospect is bright, why are there so few new entrants?

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When it is released, it is vigorous and vigorous, but when it hangs up, there is no sound

Keep your feet on the ground and look up to the stars.

Only when the predecessors have tasted the sweetness will they attract the latecomers to join.

Just like IXO, there are no products, and if you issue a coin, you can easily realize the freedom of wealth. Naturally, there will be people who will follow suit. Of course, there will be idealists, but very few.

Could it be that doing BaaS does not make money?

Therefore, Babbitt tried to restore the real application status of the BaaS platform by collecting data and interviewing with relevant technical and sales personnel, rather than reporting the good news and not the bad news in the various PR drafts you see.

conclusion as below:

1. High-profile PR, but quietly disappeared: Wangjin Holdings, Transfar Zhilian, and Wanyun.

Transfar Zhilian has deployed BaaS as early as 2017. As a traditional logistics company, its awareness is quite high. On the day of the release of BaaS, Transfar Zhilian held a huge press conference and invited business experts from Baidu Cloud, NetEase, Hikvision, Amazon (China) and other companies to join in the show.

The launch of Transfar Zhilians blockchain-as-a-service platform marks that Transfar Zhilian will become the first batch of Internet companies to promote BaaS in the logistics industry.

Later, there is no later.

We are still exploring some of the companys business scenarios, some have already landed, and some are still in the POC stage.

However, when Babbitt visited the official website of Transfar Zhilian, he did not find any introduction about BaaS.

Wangjin Holdings is better than Transfar Zhilian. At least it has released a white paper, and its products are also released on Qingyun AppCenter, and developers can try it for free. It has been more than a year and a half since the release of the BaaS product of Netgold Holdings, and there has been no new news in the market during this period.

Wanyun, once one of the important projects in the 2015-2016 strategic planning of Wanxiang Blockchain Laboratory, is considered to be the first blockchain vertical BaaS service platform in China, later known as V God Vitalik Buterin At that time, he was the chief scientist of Wanxiang Blockchain Lab and also participated in it.

In May 2017, Wanyun blockchain cloud platform was launched. In September 2017, after Wanyun announced the launch of the alliance chain node of FunChain, it is difficult to see further developments about Wanyun in the market.

Babbitt consulted Cheng Yu, who was the chief product officer of Wanyun and a partner of Wanxiang Blockchain Business Innovation Consulting. The other party said that he would no longer be in charge at the end of 2017, so he didnt know the specific situation of the current business.

2. Already closed: HNA Cloud, 58 Group.

These two companies are very contrastive. One is a physical industry that once sought a diversified layout, and the other is an Internet company known as 58.com, a magical website.

One after the other, different fields have set foot in BaaS one after another, but the end is the same.

Actually, as private enterprises, Wanda, LeTV, and HNA are at the forefront in terms of technology. However, at such a historical moment, due to the side effects of savage growth, they all fell down, and none of them were spared.

This involves another deep topic: the digital transformation of traditional enterprises. This article does not go into detail.

As for 58 Group, when 58BaaS was launched at that time, CEO Yao Jinbo also forwarded it to Moments and left a message: Trust can build a better society.

As we all know, 58.com, as a magical website, has always been full of a lot of false information and has been criticized.

Frozen three feet is not a days cold, and it is impossible to solve the problem overnight.

The time when 58 Group released BaaS happened to be concentrated among Internet giants such as Ali, Tencent, and JD. Therefore, it caused displeasure among industry insiders, who thought it was a follow-up hype.

In recent media interviews with 58BaaS, we learned that 58BaaS has been discontinued due to a brief attempt within the group last year.

3. Those who turned to the public chain: Bubi, Yunxiang, Haopu.

These three are the first batch of entrepreneurial projects in the BaaS alliance chain camp in China. In 2018, they successively developed public chains.

In 2016 and 2017, we mentioned BaaS a lot. It was a concept proposed at that time. Except for one or two projects, most of them did not use BaaS. An insider from Bubi told Babbitt.

The implementation of Yunxiang seems to be good. The founder Huang Butian told Babbitt, The first cross-institutional blockchain infrastructure in Chinas commercial banking system is built by Yunxiang. Currently, BaaS applications include China Minsheng Bank, China CITIC Bank, China Bank, Suning Bank, etc.

Haopu had cooperated with Hainan Airlines in 2017. In an interview with Babbitt, Haopu was seeking financing. The founder Ma Haobo talked to Babbitt about the characteristics of the BaaS of the Haopu blockchain, Most of the BaaS existing on the market today are based on certain aspects such as certificate deposits and points, while what Haopu provides is a platform, the underlying layer supports various Blockchains such as Fabric, Ethereum, etc.”

Technology sounds like it would be great.

Now search the keyword Haopu BaaS on the Internet, and the information stays in June 2017.

The founder Ma Haobo also stopped mentioning BaaS for a long time, and devoted himself to the aelf public chain project.

4. Still persisting: BATJ, Huawei, Ping An Technology, Zhigui Technology, Dianrong.com

It can be seen that in this BaaS arms race, none of the Internet giants is left behind.

It remains to be seen whether the giants layout of the blockchain can be made, but it is undeniable that they have inherent advantages.

The first is its own cloud service. For example, Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent, and Huawei all have cloud businesses, equipped with BaaS, which can stimulate cloud businesses. Moreover, now, except for the financial industry, almost all businesses are built on the cloud.

The second is the scene advantage. Major manufacturers all have mature and stable business models, such as the e-commerce of Ali and JD.com, the big finance of Ping An Technology, and the industrial chain of Huawei.

For the rest, the status is unknown. For example, Yixin Yiqi Cloud Service, since June last year, there has been almost no disclosure of the latest progress of BaaS in the market. Babbitt learned from insiders that the companys business department has been adjusted and the team is still working. BGIs BaaS platform experienced an abnormal login. When deploying a new channel, Babbitt followed the system prompts to bind the mailbox, and the mailbox verification function was still unavailable.

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How does BaaS make money?

This topic is really embarrassing. The real situation is that many BaaS have no idea how to make money.

The question is what about the market, is there so much real demand?

I made a few nodes before, and only 2 companies connected their platforms, and most of the time I let developers play for free.

They are all false needs. Learning and doing experiments are real needs, but the volume is not large, and developers generally build them themselves.

At present, although the BaaS platform that the developer participated in can still be accessed, it has long been unmaintained.

Like the Khwarazmo messenger problem, we love to hear good news.

The first is to sell cloud, such as Baidu, Tencent, Ali, Huawei, etc.

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(Huawei BCS price details)

Huawei BCS is clearly priced, and the charging standard adopted is based on the blockchain instance + node.

Of course, the above fees refer to the service management fee of the blockchain service, and do not include the resource fee required by the application.

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(Alibaba Cloud BaaS price details)

Alibaba Cloud also clearly marked prices, and its charging dimensions are more, divided into: blockchain type (Hyperledger Fabric/ant blockchain/enterprise Ethereum Quorum), resource type (alliance/organization), series (basic version/enterprise version /Enterprise Security Edition), storage charges, etc.

Let me briefly explain the division of alliances and organizations in resource types. Creating a blockchain instance usually requires operators and participants. The operator needs to create an alliance instance first, and then invite participants to join the alliance. Participants need to create an organization instance.

If we are the operator, choose Hyperledger Fabric, choose Alliance for resource type, and choose Enterprise Edition for series. Under such a configuration, users can enjoy 500GB of free storage space, 16-core 32GB computing node specifications, a maximum of 6 computing nodes can be deployed, and a maximum of 2000 TPS.

Under normal circumstances, the cost for one year is: 12*39699=476,000 yuan. However, according to the preferential conditions of Ali BaaS, you can enjoy a 15% discount if you buy it for one year, so the price is 405,000 yuan.

The cost of Tencent Cloud TBaaS is not disclosed on the official website. When Babbitt called the sales customer service and asked about the cost of using TBaaS, the customer service did not give a reply immediately, but spent tens of seconds to temporarily check the information, indicating that the sales staff were not familiar enough with the product.

Later, the salesperson told Babbitt that TBaaS has two configurations: private chain and alliance chain. According to the configuration of 4-core CPU, 8G memory, and 50G system disk, the monthly price is about 10,000, and the annual subscription is 20% off, 10.1 ten thousand yuan.

Baidus BaaS division is very confusing, including Du Xiaomans BaaS, the blockchain product Baidu Blockchain Engine BBE, and Baidu Smart Cloud Blockchain solution.

Du Xiaomans BaaS service is currently free. Du Xiaomans relevant personnel told Babbitt that if you want to use Baidu Cloud to deploy, you will be charged for cloud services.

BEE charging is a post-payment model that supports Ethereum, Fabric and Baidus own developed super chain.

If we deploy the Fabric blockchain, we choose the advanced version configuration: 8 cores/16G memory, 300GB hard disk space, the monthly cost is less than 4,000 yuan, and the annual cost is less than 50,000 yuan.

Compared with the previous manufacturers, I always feel that something is wrong with Baidu.

Babbitt then entered the Baidu Smart Cloud blockchain solution, charging about the same as BEE.

Babbitt clicked on the help document randomly, and 404 appeared.

It seems that Baidus BaaS products still need to continue to be polished.

In general, Huawei and Alibaba’s prices are relatively transparent for BaaS that sells clouds. Alibaba’s is the most expensive, and Baidu’s is the cheapest.

The other is to directly sell a complete set of products, such as Qulian, Yunxiang, Zhigui Technology, etc.

Taking the BaaS platform Feilu of FunChain as an example, it is divided into three versions: rapid deployment trial version, stand-alone deployment and cluster deployment. One server is equipped with four blockchain nodes, the price is cost-effective, but the performance is limited, and it is suitable for the development and testing of alliance chain applications.

For the server configuration, we choose the high-end version, which can have an 8-core processor, 16G memory and a 50G system disk. The data disk is 500G and the bandwidth is 10M.

After selection, the one-year node fee is 144,000 yuan, and the server fee is 9,800 yuan. However, Feiluo is still in the promotion period. If you buy it for one year, you can enjoy a half-price discount for nodes. The final price is 81,000 yuan.

Yunxiang did not disclose the sales information and entrance of BaaS on the official website, but Babbitt found the price list of Yunxiang on QingCloud AppCenter.

As shown above, the cost of using Yunxiang for one year is 500,000 yuan.

Babbitt logged into the QingCloud AppCenter and tried to deploy it. He found that 500,000 yuan is the basic service price. In addition, there are resource prices, such as CPU, memory, and hard disk. These configurations also cost a certain amount of money.

Babbitt chose the configuration of 8-core CPU, 16G memory and 300G hard disk, and the cost of resources was 47,000 yuan, which was less than 1/10 of the service fee.

Zhigui Technology has set up a BaaS entrance on the official website, but has not announced the cost. After registering and logging in, I can see that Zhigui Technologys BaaS supports quite a lot of blockchains, both public chains and alliance chains are supported.

Babbitt contacted Yi Xiaochun, product director of Zhigui Technology, and the other party told Babbitt that there are different products in the BaaS platform. Taking ZLedger as an example, it is divided into development version, enterprise version and customized version. The development version is free to try, and the enterprise version is charged according to the number of nodes. Each node is 4,000 yuan per month, and four nodes are configured. The total cost is 192,000 yuan a year, and some discounts will be made according to the situation. The customized version is quoted according to customer needs.

There is another category that provides solutions, and we cannot see their specific products, such as Zhilian Wanyuan. CEO Dong Ning told Babbitt that they do not provide public cloud services and mainly support their own industry applications.

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Losing money and earning money, where is the way forward?

The cloud platform departments of various manufacturers are the most active, labeling new technologies, and the purpose is still to sell clouds.

The person said frankly that the pure cloud is not easy to sell, especially in the financial market. Since the blockchain is closest to finance, the financial cloud of each platform is the most active.

The cloud is the BaaS infrastructure. It is obviously not a good choice for small businesses to do BaaS in muddy waters. The person said, “They all propose BaaS solutions, but none are really pushing them. Without cloud servers, BaaS services cannot be launched.”

Babbitt asked about the current sales situation of Yunxiang BaaS, and Huang Butian said that the overall situation is in balance. When asked why Yunxiang’s BaaS platform charges so high, the other party did not give a clear answer.

The sales situation of Zhigui Technology is also not ideal. Yi Xiaochun said that Zhigui Technology is also actively expanding more customers to use the BaaS platform, hoping to achieve satisfactory results this year.

QuChain is one of the first batch of start-up companies in China to develop blockchain alliance chains. Their BaaS platform was launched late, presumably after careful consideration. After all, the pitfalls that many people have waded through before can be avoided.

However, when Babbitt contacted QuChain to inquire about the progress of BaaS applications, an insider of QuChain said, BaaS is not very ideal at present, and the actual demand has not kept up.

On October 18, 2018, QuChain held a strategic conference and announced the launch of a new blockchain open service platform - Feiluo. According to the press release, the platform supports rapid deployment and operation and maintenance of blockchain visualization with high-quality cloud services Management, using one-stop application research and development service tools to help blockchain application intelligent security research and development, and building a safe, interconnected, and win-win blockchain new ecology with credible value transfer.

Actually, there is still very little real demand at present. There are not so many small and medium-sized customer groups using BaaS services. It is understandable for Alibaba and Tencent to do BaaS, because they themselves provide cloud services, and BaaS is just the application above.

Feiluo is still operating, but more is on the sidelines. Because at present, forced promotion may not be effective.

It is doubtful whether the BaaS business launched by some enterprises is in progress.

Babbitt called Kingsoft Clouds customer service to inquire about the basic situation of KBaaS, and changed the customer service twice. The first customer service obviously did not know that Kingsoft Cloud had BaaS business, and the second customer service just registered with Babbitt. The last reply was to ask for business information. Babbitt has not received a reply from the other party since last night until now.

Babbitt also called the sales number of China Food Chain, and made two calls during working hours, but no one answered.

In this environment, it is actually quite difficult to push BaaS services alone. Ali also sells them in their overall solution, providing a variety of services for group customers to choose from.

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Is BaaS still worth doing?

BaaS products have problems in the first place, with high costs and low benefits, and many will be closed in the future. A practitioner who has operated the above-mentioned BaaS platform told Babbitt.

The first is hardware and software costs.

Now all BaaS are actually built based on k8s (short for Kubernetes, used to manage containerized applications on multiple hosts in the cloud platform) to the next layer, and then build a complete set of BaaS based on K8s API Orchestrated system.

This also means that the overhead of a set of K8s resource pools is required under BaaS, and the cost of this part is considerable.

At the level of software development, developing a BaaS platform is not too technically difficult at present. Because once the pioneers make it, with the flow of these technical personnel, they will bring the technology into the new company, and the cost of re-developing a set of BaaS will be greatly reduced. After all, the early pitfalls have been stepped on.

The second is operation and maintenance. Doing BaaS requires a double operation and maintenance, one part is the operation and maintenance of the underlying k8s, and the other is the operation and maintenance at the BaaS level based on the chain as a unit. Currently, there are many tools for OM and monitoring of resources like K8s. But it is not enough for the operation and maintenance tools at the BaaS level. When it comes to delivering the actual production BaaS environment, each company still needs to develop supporting operation and maintenance tools by itself.

Again is the personnel cost. Two types of people are needed to develop BaaS: first, those who understand container cloud are relatively expensive in the cloud market, and their per capita annual salary ranges from hundreds of thousands to millions.

In addition, people who understand the blockchain, because it involves the arrangement of the chain, the cost of micro-senior talents is also relatively high.

The last category is conventional front-end and back-end technicians, and the cost of this part is relatively low.

Generally speaking, the cost of these three types of people is much higher than that of other cloud talents.

The above are all technical costs, and the non-technical costs are actually quite considerable.

One of the BaaS models that can be seen now is bundled with the cloud for sale. For users, one situation is that they only need cloud services, and BaaS merchants can sell BaaS services by bundling or discounting.

The other is to sell cloud resources in the name of selling BaaS, which is equivalent to mainly collecting money for cloud resources.

Aside from whether the BaaS model is established, and whether it is appropriate to comprehensively manage and deploy multiple N chains on a cloud platform similar to pass, just from the descriptions of costs you can see earlier, you will I found that the first 99 steps are all investment, and there are a lot of extra investment, but the last 1 how to make money is very weak and not particularly clear. In the final analysis, the company wants to make money. For them, this is obviously not the best product choice. type.

Yi Xiaochun also said that operating a BaaS business line requires a lot of effort, including early technical research, product development, and later product maintenance and business operations. The entire cost adds up to tens of millions.

It is not a very good model economically, and from the perspective of fundamentalist blockchain thinking, BaaS is not a product that well implements the decentralized thinking of blockchain.

It is difficult to implement BaaS.

But from another perspective, the form of BaaS is easy to understand. As a teaching platform or POC platform, in the early stages of the industry, building BaaS can educate users, expand industry boundaries, and attract developers.

However, with the development of the industry, BaaS is still working hard in 2019. This is actually more of the teams own selfishness, rather than a decision made from the companys overall situation. The aforementioned anonymous person said.

If the blockchain can have a better profit model, a better business model that conforms to economics and objective laws, and a product model appears, everyone will still do things that can make money. If the blockchain is delayed I can’t find a good way to make money for a long time. For team leaders or project managers, what they can do may be BaaS, and what they can explain to the boss may be BaaS. In the end, it is nothing more than procrastination. BaaS will be done for a year first , We will wait for the development of the industry later.”

However, from a practical point of view, BaaS has been tirelessly promoted from its appearance in 2016 to 2019, which at least shows that there is a certain degree of objectivity and rationality.