Xunlei Shares Jump 6% after New Blockchain Announcement
Xunlei boasts its new blockchain platform can conduct millions of transactions per second. The tech platform's stock regained strength after a long slide following class action lawsuits.
The shares of Xunlei Ltd. (Nasdaq: XNET) jumped 6 percent today after the cloud technology company announced the launch of a blockchain platform, ThunderChain.
Xunlei said its new "high-performance" blockchain framework can carry out millions of transactions per second. ThunderChain's practical byzantine fault tolerance, which is a method of finding consensus among a distributed network, was optimized to minimize latency and to facilitate generating one block per second, it said.
Xunlei also announced it would host a Blockchain Applications Global Challenge in a partnership with InfoQ, a Canada-based news interface for software developers. The campaign, Xunlei said, would advance blockchain applications and foster talents "to help overcome complex challenges facing multiple industries, including logistics, healthcare, education, and the public sectors." Challenge participants could use ThunderChain for developing applications, the company said.
ThunderChain was built upon an existing blockchain platform that Xunlei used in October to generate its custom token, the company told CoinDesk.
At the time, Chinese authorities alleged the token was an initial coin offering (ICO), which was banned in China. That allegation led to Xunlei's stock plunge at the time and its investors filed multiple class action lawsuits that remain unresolved. Chief executive officer of Xunlei, Lei Chen, denied making a public offering of a coin.
Following months of sliding, Xunlei closed at $13.46 per American depositary share Friday, up 6 percent.
