UEFA Top Scorer trophy presented by Alipay unveiled for UEFA Nations League

The UEFA Top Scorer trophy presented by Alipay will be awarded to the leading marksman in the 2022/23 UEFA Nations League, covering the league phase and finals. The winner's scoring records will be uploaded to blockchain for permanent storage.

Sculpted in the shape of the Chinese character "支" (pronounced zhi, and meaning 'payment' as well as 'support'), the barefooted player on the trophy reflects the egalitarian footballing ideal that success on the pitch comes regardless of background or status. The hash code on the base of the trophy, meanwhile, underlines AntChain's commitment to ensuring a permanent, incorruptible record of the top scorer's achievements with blockchain technology.

AntChain, the flagship technology brand of Ant Group Digital Technologies, announced the five-year global partnership around blockchain technology with UEFA in 2021. According to the agreement, AntChain is the official global blockchain partner of UEFA national team football. This year, TopNod, the digital collections platform of AntChain, is also benefitting from Ant Group's rights as UEFA's Official Global Partner for men's national team events, including UEFA EURO 2024, the European Qualifiers and the UEFA Nations League finals, and will explore opportunities in digital collections around football games together with UEFA.

Blockchain technology is a method of recording data to ensure that there is a permanent, widely distributed record of every update, ensuring that technologies cannot be hacked or retrospectively tampered with. Now blockchain is being developed by AntChain not just at UEFA events to store top scorer records but also to support women's youth football and players' career development in China through on-chain statistics.

In the evolving digital era, Alipay has transformed from a trusted payment tool to an open platform for businesses, institutions, service providers, and other partners. Business partners in various industries utilise Alipay to offer consumers a safe and convenient payment experience. Through digital operations on the Alipay platform, business partners can communicate and provide various commercial and daily-life digital services for their clients via Alipay mini-programs, lifestyle accounts and IoT, along with other available tools. Currently, there have been over 80 million businesses serving more than 1 billion consumers via Alipay's open platform services.