Chinese internet company Baidu Inc. announced today the launch of the public beta for its “Xuperchain” open distributed ledger blockchain project.

The company announced the public beta during an online press conference, which mentioned that the infrastructure is now live for testing and is generally available as a beta product. Until March, new users can pay as little as 1 Chinese yuan – about 14 cents – to deploy distributed applications on the blockchain.

According to the company’s website, the technology behind Xuperchain, branded as Xuper, uses in-chain parallel processing to execute smart contracts as quickly as possible and in order to take advantage of multicore and multimachine computing capability. To do this, Xuperchain uses supercomputers as “super nodes,” which themselves are connected in a distributed network but appear to the rest of the network as single nodes. A “node” in a blockchain network acts as a validator and processor for transactions that assures network integrity and provides computational power and storage.

Smart contracts on the Xuperchain network can be written and executed in Solidity and Go. Solidity is a well-known smart contract programming language used for the Ethereum blockchain, and Go is a Google-created language that has also been adapted for Ethereum smart contracts.

The Xuperchain network boasts a network latency globally as low as three seconds and within the local alliance private network link at less than 10 milliseconds. The company claims the blockchain is capable of providing 65,000 transactions per second on a single chain and 200,000 TPS across the entire network.

According to the company’s website, the Xuperchain blockchain network has executed more than 450 million transactions and currently hosts almost 3.5 million users. The network is also tracking about 350 TPS, which is higher than the Ethereum public network, which can sustain 15 TPS.

The underlying technology of Xuperchain was released as open-source software on May 28, 2019, following the announcement of the blockchain’s development in September 2018 through a white paper from Baidu.

“Baidu hopes to open up the underlying industry through self-developed underlying technologies to drive the development of the entire industry,” Xiao Wei, director of the chain laboratory at Baidu, said at the time.

The Xuperchain technology is designed so that users do not need to do a lot of coding and can quickly deploy a blockchain application on the network.

Developed in-house, its product ecosystem is a blockchain-as-a-service offering allowing self-deployed apps. XuperFair uses blockchain tamper-resistance to provide evidence storage in cooperation with the Beijing Internet Court, XuperIPR provides a blockchain for intellectual property registration and protection and XuperEngine is Baidu’s one-click infrastructure service platform for deploying blockchain networks (including monitoring, smart contracts and orchestration).

Baidu’s announcement follows a trend of many Chinese companies building out blockchain solutions. For example, Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.’s Ant Financial raised $14 billion in 2018 for a blockchain network expected to release this year, retailer JD.com launched an e-commerce blockchain in 2018 and Chinese internet services giant Tencent Holdings Ltd. announced plans to launch a blockchain-based virtual bank.

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