Analysts are now wary that Xi’s endorsement could lead to interest groups ranging from local officials to tech start-ups and cryptocurrency investors to misuse and distort the technology to further their own agendas.

“When there is high level political support for a technology, the sceptics who point early to the risks are drowned out by people who fall into the right political line and trumpet the technology,” said Martin Chorzempa, a researcher from the Washington-based Peterson Institute for International Economics.

He also argued that blockchain has low efficiency and is difficult to implement across society as a whole.

“The People’s Bank of China has said that blockchain cannot handle the volume of transactions they need for [its version of a central bank digital currency]. They know it is inefficient. The question after [Xi’s] speech is, does that technically correct position remain politically acceptable to hold?,” he said.

“I believe if China widely implemented blockchain today, its growth would slow even more rapidly. Blockchains are famously inefficient and only should be used in specific scenarios where the goal is some degree of decentralisation.”

Beijing often attaches great importance to technological development as it seeks to close the gap with the United States. Technological upgrading of traditional manufacturing, the use of big data and the roll out of artificial intelligence have been among the innovations championed by the government in recent years.

Blockchain is the latest technology to catch the national imagination, with Xi’s speech overriding concerns among scientists, technology professionals and financial investors about its efficacy.

“It’s worth discussing whether it is appropriate to use the force of an entire nation to promote a specific technology,” said Ding Shuang, chief Greater China economist of Standard Chartered Bank. “I believe decision-makers are emphasising more [of blockchain’s] technological attributes rather than its financial applications.”

However, it is easy to turn a popular subject into financial speculation, Ding warned, a lesson China should have learned from the outcry over the collapse of P2P lending platforms, which were supposed to help solve the country’s funding problems, but many later proved to be fraudulent Ponzi schemes.

Valuations of dozens of developers of blockchain applications or products rose by their daily limit of 10 per cent on Monday, the first trading day after Xi’s speech, while the price of bitcoin has risen by nearly 25 per cent in the past week, surpassing US$10,000 at one point.

More than 20 provinces and municipalities have adopted blockchain-promoting policies since it was first mentioned in a State Council planning document in 2016 and there are already 10 blockchain industrial parks nationwide.

The autonomous region of Tibet and the province of Guizhou have announced efforts to use blockchain for poverty alleviation, a signature Xi campaign, and to improve financial transparency.

Local media in Zhejiang province reported that the provincial government has used blockchain to streamline medical insurance for patients, while a project in the remote western province of Ningxia is reported to have used the technology for quality control of agricultural products.

Qu Qiang, a researcher with the international monetary institute at Renmin University of China, said the decentralised nature of blockchain technology jarred sharply with China’s central planning of its economy and vision for its digital currency, which would also be managed centrally. He also warned that it could lead to widespread fraud, similarly to the P2P sector.

“Many years after the notion was brought forward, we seldom heard that any countries or companies use blockchain to tackle real problems or create new values,” he said. “We are now preoccupied with preventing financial risks, such as illegal deposit-taking, frauds, and high leverage ratio. None of them can be really helped by blockchain technology.”