Key Highlights:
- The Ministry of Science & Technology has given the National Blockchain Technology Innovation Centre the go-ahead.
- The center will create hardware, software, and basic theory with an emphasis on applications that advance the national economy.
China continues to embrace blockchain technology despite its continued crackdown on cryptos, even going so far as to open the National Blockchain Technology Innovation Center in Beijing, the country’s capital.
About the Blockchain center
The Beijing Academy of Blockchain & Edge Computing (BABEC), a research organization supported by the Beijing government and one of the creators of Chang’an Chain (ChainMaker), China’s first homegrown open-source blockchain platform, will serve as the center’s director. According to the source, the new center would handle blockchain technology research and industrialization, including fundamental theories, hardware and software development, and blockchain platform construction.
China on Blockchain
China has increased its support for blockchain development over the past few years while stepping up its crackdown on cryptos, which the government sees as a danger to financial stability. The Chinese government clarified that all cryptocurrency trading was prohibited in 2021.
Blockchain will play “an key role in the next phase of technical innovation and economic change,” Chinese President Xi Jinping predicted just two years prior. China’s two primary tech sector regulators, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) & the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), stated in guidelines released in 2021 that the country aims to deploy blockchain widely across a variety of industries by 2030.
At least 29 cities and provinces included blockchain in their five-year plans for 2021–2025, according to the Blockchain Whitepaper (2022) published by the China Academy of Information & Communications Technology (CAICT) in December 2022. China had over 1,400 blockchain-related companies, which accounted for more than 20% of the global total.
