JD.com’s “ZhiZhen Chain” Blockchain Platform: Technology Overview and Industry Applications

On November 19, 2019 at the JD Discovery conference, JD Digital Technology Group Vice President Cao Peng introduced the company’s blockchain brand “ZhiZhen Chain” and announced the 2020 strategy of moving from a trusted supply chain to digital financial innovation.

“ZhiZhen Chain” combines the ideas of intelligent technology (智), a beautiful life vision (臻), and connectivity (链). It represents JD’s commitment to using blockchain to serve trustworthy economic activities.

In March 2019 JD launched the open‑source JD Chain, an enterprise‑grade blockchain framework with a component‑based design that allows pluggable consensus, ledger, contract, and storage modules, enabling users to assemble customized blockchain systems like building blocks.

JD Chain achieves up to 20,000 transactions per second on a single chain, fully supports national cryptographic algorithms, and introduces a novel regulatable signature algorithm that preserves signer anonymity while allowing authorized de‑identification.

The JD BaaS platform, built on JD Chain, Fabric, and Stellar, supports multiple operating systems (including Red Hat, Ubuntu, DeepBlue, and Kylin) and lets users create a multi‑organization blockchain network in 30 seconds, with more than 1,000 nodes deployed to date for use cases such as product traceability, ABS cloud networks, and digital evidence.

Key industry applications include supply‑chain traceability (over 700 brand partners, 60,000+ products, 6 million user queries, and 1.3 billion on‑chain records), a smart vaccine management system with 28 vaccine types and 827 safe injections, and a blockchain‑based ABS solution that reduces deployment time by 85% and saves over one million yuan in annual operational costs per node.

JD’s blockchain team focuses on five integration directions: supply‑chain traceability, digital evidence, fintech, regtech, and consumer‑facing innovations, aiming to continuously expand digital finance services and support trusted supply‑chain scenarios such as food and drug safety.

Future plans emphasize scaling trusted supply‑chain services, advancing digital financial innovation, and leveraging AIoT, big data, and cloud computing to create comprehensive, secure, and transparent financial and logistical ecosystems.