Blockchain with ‘Chinese characteristics’ quietly takes off with Beijing’s blessing while shunning cryptocurrency
- The number of newly registered blockchain services has sped up in China this year, with the total now surpassing 1,800
- Most services listed over the past three years are related to law, finance and Blockchain-as-a-Service applications
The pace of certification for new blockchain services sped up at the end of last year, with the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) releasing new lists of recent ventures every two to four months, up from six to eight months from March 2019 through 2021.
The agency has released 197 lists in three years, with blockchain projects encompassing legal, financial, agricultural and intellectual property protection services.
The accelerated release schedule illustrates Beijing’s determination to develop blockchain applications that align with the country’s economic and technological goals, while maintaining tight control over the more decentralised applications for which the technology is known.
The country has banned the trading of cryptocurrencies, blockchain’s original use case with bitcoin, which also effectively prohibits the trading of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) on public blockchains like Ethereum.
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However, an increasing number of Chinese companies are looking for new applications for blockchain, potentially opening up a huge market for services run on the technology, which is a type of immutable distributed ledger maintained by different computer nodes on a network. Market research firm IDC estimates that China’s blockchain market could be worth over US$3.2 billion by 2025, with an annual compound growth rate of 47 per cent from 2020 to 2025.