China now seems to be in the lead in developing new blockchain technologies.
“[The US] hasn’t taken any steps to target it or counter China’s influence in the development of blockchain technology,” said Sam Dorshimer.
China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology announced a new national blockchain committee that brings together experts from government, think tanks, universities and tech companies to help set standards for using the technology across industries.
The most obvious use of blockchain is in finance because of its ability to lower costs by circumventing existing financial infrastructure, such as the Society for SWIFT, which facilitates global banking transfers.
Ant Group – China’s dominant fintech company and an affiliate of Alibaba Group Holding, the parent company of the South China Morning Post – has offered a blockchain-based remittance service since 2018 for transfers between Hong Kong and the Philippines.
Tencent is providing cloud infrastructure to make it easier to manage documents, while ShareRing’s blockchain can track a variety of things such as travel information, hotel reservations and insurance policies.
According to the Blockchain Service Network (BSN) technical whitepaper, the network makes blockchains “uniform”, allowing developers to use a single private key to deploy a DApp across different blockchain protocols.
“If [blockchain companies] are building wells, then BSN is building water supply pipes,” Liu said.