Chengdu is expected to become a new highland for the development of blockchain in my country

Chengdu is also known as the "Land of Abundance". This city has a long history and culture. There is an old saying that "You must go to Sichuan when you are young and you must not leave Sichuan when you are old". In people's impression, Chengdu is a slow-paced place, with big bowls of tea on Wangjiang Road, long legs on Chunxi Road, and sitting in a food stall at night, drinking cold beer, eating skewers and chatting with friends. The pleasant climate and leisurely pace of life make this historical and cultural ancient city a place where people who come here linger and become the city with the highest sense of happiness.

Different from the comfortable "slow-paced" life, the city has been developing faster and faster in economic development and technological innovation in recent years. At present, Chengdu has become an important part of China's new global urban development pattern, especially in the development of the Internet, high-tech, and electronic information industries.

At the end of May, Chengdu held a series of blockchain conferences. Half of the practitioners in the blockchain industry from all over the country gathered here, experts, miners, corporate executives, opinion leaders, and senior developers exchanged views on the current status of the industry and discussed the future development direction of blockchain technology.

Chengdu's blockchain industry has already caught up with Beijing and Shenzhen. Today, Mao Wen will analyze from the three dimensions of "policy", "enterprise" and "talent" whether Chengdu is expected to become the "new highland" of the blockchain industry in the future.

In my country, the success of an industry depends largely on local policies. The rapid development of Chengdu’s blockchain industry is due to the strong support of the government.

As a relatively developed city in the southwest, Chengdu's GDP has entered the trillion club. Chengdu carries the strategic task of building China's western financial center. Chengdu is also the main carrier of Sichuan Province as a digital economy development innovation pilot zone, which is also its political mission. Therefore, it spares no effort in cultivating and supporting new technologies.

Speaking of blockchain policies, the Chengdu government has been promoting the development of blockchain at the policy level since 2017, when other regions were still only partially aware of blockchain. At that time, the attention paid to blockchain was far less than it is now, so most policies were only attached to the links of policies related to economic and financial development, and no special blockchain industry support policies were issued. However, it was already one step ahead and laid the foundation for the development of blockchain in Chengdu.

After the core layer collectively studied the development status and trends of blockchain technology in 2019 and regarded blockchain technology as an important breakthrough for independent innovation of core technologies, various parts of the country have made some deployments for blockchain technology, and the pace of blockchain development in Chengdu has been significantly accelerated.

On May 14, 2020, at the third session of the 17th Chengdu People's Congress, Mayor Luo Qiangzuo stated in his government work report that he would accelerate the construction of Chengdu into a financial center in the west.

The report mentioned that it is necessary to accelerate the construction of blockchain intellectual property pledge financing service platform, promote the establishment of digital asset trading center, and solidly promote the pilot of legal digital currency. Just one month ago, the central bank announced that the digital currency DCEP will be tested first in Shenzhen, Xiong'an, Chengdu and Suzhou as pilot areas.

In the same month, the Chengdu Municipal People's Government and the Chengdu Branch of the People's Bank of China jointly launched the Chengdu Financial Technology Development Plan (2020-2022), which also mentioned a lot of content about blockchain, made plans for the application of blockchain in financial scenarios, and proposed to accelerate the development and application of blockchain technology. In this plan of less than 8,000 words, blockchain appears 17 times and is placed first among new-generation information technologies such as artificial intelligence, big data, and cloud computing, which shows its importance.

Mao Wen believes that in order for the development of blockchain to achieve results, in addition to the development of the technology itself, government promotion is particularly important. From the current point of view, the Chengdu government attaches great importance to blockchain, but how to promote the development of blockchain in a targeted manner and in which direction to develop still requires practice and exploration.

Under the characteristic market economic system, many enterprises follow the policies. The Chengdu government strongly supports blockchain, which will attract many enterprises. Therefore, Chengdu also has certain advantages in the reserve of blockchain enterprises and talents.

The Sichuan Blockchain Industry White Paper (2019), co-authored by the Sichuan Provincial Department of Economy and Information Technology and the association in January this year, pointed out that Sichuan Province has 44 enterprises focusing on blockchain technology research. Among them, Chengdu ranks first in the number of core blockchain enterprises. Data shows that as of December 6, 2019, 35 core blockchain enterprises have settled in Chengdu. At the same time, according to Tianyancha data on December 27, 2019, there are 365 enterprises in Sichuan Province whose business scope includes blockchain, and 298 in Chengdu.

Mao Wen believes that these data are merely official statistics. Most of the companies whose business scope includes blockchain are technology and research companies. In fact, there are a large number of digital currency-related companies in Chengdu that are not included in the list, including digital currency exchanges, project parties, and mining practitioners.

As regulatory crackdowns on digital currencies become more severe in the future, most exchanges and project owners will seek to go overseas to avoid regulation, or seek compliance in China. In this case, doing something related to blockchain technology will be a good idea.

In terms of Bitcoin mining, Chinese miners control nearly two-thirds of the world’s computing power, with Sichuan alone accounting for 54% of the country’s total. Rich hydropower resources make Sichuan the country’s largest Bitcoin mining site, and most of Sichuan’s mining-related companies are in Chengdu or have offices there.

As the output of Bitcoin is halved, the mining income of miners is reduced. Currently, it is in the flood season, and the maximum cost of miners, electricity, is low and can still be maintained. After the flood season, if Bitcoin cannot reach a relatively high price, a large number of mining-related companies and practitioners will face transformation, and most will choose to continue to work in the blockchain industry, which is also a good thing for the future development of blockchain in Chengdu.

When it comes to talent, Chengdu's educational resources are at the forefront of the western region, and Chengdu adopts a software outsourcing and software service strategy. It has a famous software park and is a famous software city with a large number of programmers and IT talents.

In terms of blockchain talent supply, Chengdu accounts for 5.29%, Hangzhou accounts for 5.03%, and Wuhan accounts for 2.04%. Chengdu's blockchain talent supply is second only to Beijing, Shenzhen, and Shanghai.

In December 2019, Chengdu City also established a "Blockchain Talent Committee" to train blockchain professionals to meet the talent needs of blockchain technology for the development of the new economy and the transformation of traditional industries. In addition, Chengdu University of Information Technology has opened an undergraduate major in "Blockchain Engineering", which is also the first undergraduate major in blockchain in the country.

Chengdu has a large number of blockchain companies and a large number of blockchain talents, which is the biggest weight for Chengdu's blockchain industry to achieve breakthroughs in the future.

Since the beginning of this year, under the guidance of the central government's general policy on blockchain, the current Chengdu Municipal Party Committee and Municipal Government have introduced a number of positive measures regarding blockchain technology, which can be said to have laid a solid foundation for the development of Chengdu's blockchain industry in the next three years.

In the future, whether Chengdu's blockchain industry can become a benchmark industry like Guangdong's furniture and Jiangsu and Zhejiang's clothing will require fully mobilizing the activity of enterprises.

We should actively guide the healthy transformation of companies engaged in digital currency, allowing these companies to use their years of accumulation in the industry to provide support for the transformation of the traditional real economy. Perhaps in the future, Chengdu will truly become a dazzling business card for blockchain technology!