Ant Group, led by Jack Ma, launched the Ethereum-based Layer-2 blockchain Jovay on October 14, aiming to achieve 100,000 transactions per second. This Ant Group L2 focuses on the tokenization of real-world assets, adopts a compliance-first strategy, and does not issue a native Token, bringing the immense potential of Alipay's 1.4 billion users to Ethereum, which could fundamentally change the global financial infrastructure.
Jack Ma's Ant Group L2 Strategic Layout Shocks the Market
(Source: GrowThePie)
On October 14, Ant Group, the Chinese fintech giant behind Alipay's 1.4 billion users, officially launched Jovay, a new Layer 2 Blockchain built on Ethereum. This Ant Group L2 is specifically designed to transfer real-world assets onto the chain at an institutional scale, marking a significant bet on decentralized finance by one of the world's largest fintech companies.
Ant Group's blockchain division, Ant Digital, describes Jovay as “Compliance-first, AI-assisted expansive network,” aimed at integrating real-world data and value flows into decentralized finance. This positioning clearly indicates that Ant Group's L2, under Jack Ma, is not targeting the retail speculation market but is instead aimed at large-scale adoption by enterprises and institutions.
The most notable aspect is that this Ant Group L2 platform intentionally launched without issuing a native Token. This strategic decision is starkly different from most Layer-2 projects, showing that Ant Group is more focused on practical application value rather than Token economic speculation. For a company serving 1.4 billion users and processing trillions of payments annually, this pragmatic approach demonstrates its commitment to long-term infrastructure development.
Jovay adopts a dual proof architecture, combining a mixed mechanism of zero-knowledge proofs and optimistic proofs to ensure scalability and verifiability. According to the disclosures in the technical paper, the network achieved between 15,700 to 22,000 transactions per second during the testing phase, and aims for 100,000 transactions per second through node clustering and horizontal scaling.
This performance indicator will be significantly higher than the throughput available in the current Ethereum Layer-2 ecosystem.
Alipay has 1.4 billion active users each month, and even if a small portion of these activities can migrate to the Ethereum track through this Ant Group L2, the network could become one of the most important infrastructure bridges in the global financial sector. This is not only a technological upgrade but also a historic opportunity to bring a billion-level user base into the blockchain ecosystem.
Institutional-grade solutions for tokenization of real-world assets
Jack Ma's Ant Group focuses on the tokenization of real-world assets in the L2 space, which has quietly become the fastest-growing track on Ethereum. According to data from RWA XYZ, the total value of tokenized government bonds, invoices, and funds on Ethereum currently exceeds $12 billion, having grown by over 300% since the beginning of 2024. However, most liquidity remains confined to niche protocols with unclear regulations.
This is precisely the bottleneck that Ant Group's L2 aims to break through. Jovay introduces a complete process in five stages: asset registration, construction, tokenization, issuance, and trading. Each step embeds verification checkpoints and off-chain data proofs, effectively providing regulators with the same regulatory perspective as in traditional finance. This design ensures compliance while maintaining the efficiency advantages of blockchain.
By integrating AntChain's enterprise registry with Ethereum, this Ant Group L2 can achieve bilateral settlement between licensed institutions and on-chain liquidity providers. For example, a bank issuing digital bonds on Jovay can settle immediately with DeFi counterparties without disclosing internal information or violating judicial controls. This capability builds a compliant bridge between traditional finance and decentralized finance.
Abbas Khan, the successful manager and founder of the Ethereum Foundation, highly praised the launch of Ant Group's L2 by Jack Ma: “This is not just another startup experiment. This is a signal that the next phase of global finance is being built on the Ethereum track. In China, Alipay is not just an application; it is an infrastructure layer serving daily life, payments, loans, insurance, identity verification, mobile transportation, and more. Now, Ant Group is migrating this infrastructure onto the chain.”
This evaluation is not exaggerated. Alipay's penetration and usage frequency in China far exceed any Western payment application. From street vendors to large shopping malls, from public transportation to hospital registration, Alipay has deeply integrated into the daily lives of hundreds of millions of people. If this Ant Group L2 can migrate some functions of the Alipay ecosystem on-chain, it will bring unprecedented real-use scenarios and transaction volume to the Blockchain.
From a cost perspective, choosing Ethereum as the underlying platform is also a wise business decision. The report shows that since its launch in 2023, the Base network has contributed less than $5 million in blob and settlement fees to Ethereum Layer 1 validators. Compared to the costs faced by independent chains in terms of validator fees, this represents a profit margin of 98%. For Ant Group, this efficiency means providing a cheaper settlement method for its billion-scale user base.
Jack Ma's Ant Group Strategic Considerations Behind L2
Ant Group, under Jack Ma, venturing into Ethereum marks a structural shift in the global financial technology perspective on blockchain risks. For years, major companies favored permissioned ledgers like Hyperledger to avoid volatility and public chain risks. However, as governments and other major financial institutions increasingly attempt to utilize public chains such as Ethereum for their own interests, this cautious attitude is changing.
By building this Ant Group L2 on Ethereum instead of a proprietary network, Ant effectively validates the feasibility of public infrastructure as a basis for institutional financing. This choice is not technology-driven but strategically driven. While proprietary blockchains offer strong control, they face issues such as ecosystem closure, poor interoperability, and high long-term maintenance costs. In contrast, Layer-2 built on Ethereum can directly access a DeFi ecosystem worth $100 billion.
In addition, this Ant Group L2 strategy is also aimed at hedging technological isolation and achieving interoperability. Any asset minted on Jovay can, in principle, interact with other protocols on Ethereum, from Uniswap's liquidity pools to Aave's lending markets. This openness provides limitless possibilities for future financial innovations, far beyond what closed systems can achieve.
From a geopolitical perspective, the timing of Jack Ma's Ant Group L2 launch is quite significant. Against the backdrop of an increasingly fragmented global financial system and intensifying competition in digital currencies, choosing Ethereum, a relatively neutral international public chain, rather than relying entirely on domestic blockchain technology, demonstrates Ant Group's commitment to a global strategy. This could open new pathways for deep integration between Chinese fintech companies and international markets.
Khan emphasized that Ant Group's actions indicate that the next billion users will not emerge through memecoins or yield farming. Instead, they will appear as their assets, savings, and credit tools quietly migrate to compatible rails running on Ethereum. This perspective accurately captures the essence of Ant Group's L2: built not for speculation, but born out of actual financial needs.
If Jovay gains development momentum, the tokenization financial share of Ethereum may surpass today's RWA niche market. This means that every new asset class introduced on-chain, including energy credits and local government bonds, will create new demand for ETH block space and liquidity routing. This demand does not come from speculative trading, but from real economic activities, which will bring more stable and sustainable growth to the Ethereum ecosystem.
Jovay's debut also reflects the slow process of Ethereum gaining institutional trust. What once seemed like an unstable experiment has now become a neutral settlement layer that banks and fintech giants can rely on without relinquishing control. The launch of Jack Ma's Ant Group L2 is the most powerful validation of this trust-building process.
