Alipay, a division of Alibaba Group, has replaced PayPal to be the world’s biggest third-party online payment platform with more than 200 million users.

According to the Hangzhou-based company, this rise is mainly attributable to a brisk growth in the past ten months, when its user number doubled from 100 million.

Alipay did not see its user number top 100 million until August 2008, nearly five years after its birth.

It expects to overtake PayPal in transaction volume in the three years, says Shao Xiaofeng, the company’s President.

Currently, this online payment service provider still lags behind PayPal in terms of actual transaction volume.

However, the five-year-old Alipay has grown into one of the most important applications in the domestic Internet industry, said Mr. Shao, noting that the fast expansion of Alipay demonstrates a robust growth in the Asian e-commerce market.

Alipay initiated the world’s first transaction-guaranteed payment model in an effort to keep sellers and buyers away from possible risks. Under the model, Alipay serves as a third-party in the transactions – buyers are supposed to transfer payment to Alipay, which will then hand over the payment to the sellers after products are received.

“The number of Alipay users take up 62.5% of the total netizen number in the country,” said a market observer, “that is to say, six out of ten netizens there are Alipay users.”

More importantly, the Chinese Internet market is forecasted to maintain an energetic growth in the future. The country is likely to see its netizen number exceed 600 million two years or more after the figure touch 320 million, predicted analysts earlier.

Alipay, which emerged as an online payment solution for Taobao.com, turned to an independent operation on the eve of Alibaba.com’s listing. (USD 1 = CNY 6.83)