 Adoption of WeChat Pay saw a major increase following the launch, and two years later, over 32 billion virtual envelopes were sent over the Chinese New Year holiday in 2016 (itself a tenfold increase over 2015).The popularity of the feature spawned imitations from other vendors; a "red envelope war" emerged between WeChat owner Tencent and its historic rival, Alibaba Group, who added a similar function to its competing messaging service and has held similar giveaway promotions.Analysts estimated that over 100 billion digital red envelopes would be sent over the New Year holiday in 2017.