Xunlei Ltd (NASDAQ:XNET) recently announced the launch of its open blockchain platform called “ThunderChain.” The announcement was made in the Chinese capital, Beijing during a press event. Despite the ongoing issues with an alleged initial coin offering (ICO), the US-listed technology firm running on a cloud-based network has decided to launch the proprietary blockchain platform that will help the developers to build decentralization applications.
As per the claims by the Shenzhen-based Chinese company, its new product has the capacity to process millions of transactions per second. According to Xunlei’s statement, ThunderChain’s mechanism is based on the practical Byzantine fault tolerance (PBFT) consensus that empowers it with such rapid processing capacity.
The statement from the company says that its new proprietary blockchain-based platform will work in combination with the current capacity of its existing cloud-based content delivery that works on the peer-to-peer distributed network. Xunlei launched a blockchain platform for generating custom token – LinkToken in October last year making its first entry into the blockchain space in 2017. The platform allowed the users to generate LinkToken by buying OneThing Cloud, a newly introduced cloud storage device that allowed sharing spare broadband bandwidth. ThunderChain has been built on this existing platform of the company.
Xunlei Affected By ICO Issues And Allegations
Xunlei, that started its business in 2003 with its peer-to-peer download app, Thunder, is now facing some serious issues and allegations from the National Internet Finance Association in China. When the company first announced the launch of LinkToken in October, its stock price spiked from $4 to $20 in a month. However, the prices stumbled to $10 after the financial self-regulatory in China accused that LinkToken was supporting initial miner offering.
Even though the popularity of Xunlei’s Thunder that uses the idle broadband capacity of the users to manage fast uploads and downloads of digital content has not been affected, the association of LinkToken as a fundraising ICO method has affected its standing in the field badly. This action by the Chinese agency is in accordance with its statement issued in January this year that says that residents participating in the purchase of hardware for generation of token involving ICO is considered to be a fundraising method and which is explicitly banned in the country.
