The news of the partnership between Alibaba Cloud and the NEAR Foundation, hit the market shortly after Alibaba announced a new chairman.
The non-profit NEAR Foundation is joining Alibaba Cloud to accelerate Web3 growth. On Monday, the organization revealed its new relationship with the Chinese tech giant’s arm for computing and storage, noting that the target is Asia and the Middle East.
NEAR Foundation and Alibaba Cloud Collaborate
Under the partnership between the NEAR Foundation and Alibaba Cloud, the former will have access to the latter’s developer ecosystem across the selected jurisdictions. This will bring additional developers on board to build on the NEAR protocol. Speaking to CoinDesk, the company stated that the Alibaba Cloud plug-and-play infrastructure as a service will be available in the launching of new NEAR validators. The head of international Web3 solutions at Alibaba Cloud intelligence Raymond Xiao commented:
“The NEAR Foundation and Alibaba Cloud partnership is an important one as we continue to support Web developers to explore opportunities.”
Furthermore, developers are positioned to enjoy multiple benefits due to the new alliance between the NEAR Foundation and Alibaba Cloud. The joint venture plans to offer remote procedure calls (RPC) as a service to developers, in addition to the plug-and-play service infrastructure as a service. The RPC as a service will also be available to users in the NEAR ecosystem. Notably, the remote procedure call is used to call other processes on the remote systems, like a local system.
Additionally, users of the Alibaba Cloud infrastructures will also be able to use the NEAR Blockchain Operating System (BOS). Since its launch earlier this year, the BOS has been helping with user interaction, allowing them to build into one another.
Alibaba’s Management Restructuring
The news of the partnership between Alibaba Cloud and the NEAR Foundation, hit the market shortly after Alibaba announced a new chairman. The Chinese tech giant recently restructured its management and made Joseph Tsai its new Chairman. Tsai is a founding member of the group and will activate his new role come September. The newly-announced Chairman is a vocal crypto proponent and an active Web3 investor. The crypto bull once tweeted, “I like Crypto,” in December 2021. While he did not add more details to his declaration, he has participated in crypto-related investments. Tsai was involved in Polygon’s funding round in February 2022 and Artifact Labs’ May 2023 round.
Part of the management restructuring at Alibaba also included a change in its CEO. Co-founder Eddie Wu would be taking over from Daniel Zhang, who took the position after Jack Ma stepped down. The current CEO noted in an internal memo that Alibaba needs to shift its focus on its cloud business. He emphasized the important relationship between cloud computing and tech, especially in the new wake of AI technology.
“As everyone is well aware, the development of core technologies such as cloud computing, big data and AI will lead to a tremendous transformation of our society and is of utmost strategic significance.”
Meanwhile, according to a March announcement, Alibaba plans to split the company into six units.
Ibukun is a crypto/finance writer interested in passing relevant information, using non-complex words to reach all kinds of audience.
Apart from writing, she likes to see movies, cook, and explore restaurants in the city of Lagos, where she resides.
