China to join global blockchain arms race with ChinaLedger Alliance

Wanxiang Blockchain Lab is a non-profit research institute in Shanghai, China, which hosted the first Global Blockchain Summit in Shanghai. It will lead an alliance of 11 regional commodity exchanges, equity exchanges, and financial asset exchanges to establish an "open source blockchain protocol." According to Bai Shuo (former chief engineer of the Shanghai Stock Exchange and director of the ChinaLedger Alliance Technical Committee), this "open source blockchain protocol" will enable developers to continue to expand on it in the future.

The China Securities Association Cyber ​​Securities Committee is an industry self-regulatory body that operates under the supervision of the China Securities Regulatory Commission. It will form an advisory team including Bloq's Jeff Garzik, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin, R3 Alliance's Tim Swanson, Ethereum co-founder Anthony Di Iorio and other well-known blockchain community members.

ChinaLeger will research and develop “internet of things” applications to provide organizations with a way to comply with China’s unique regulatory standards. A 2013 Cisco report estimated that the market will be worth $15 trillion by 2025.

The specific details have not yet been determined, but the goal is to use and improve the current blockchain technology to meet the requirements of Chinese business and industry standards and ensure compliance with China's unique regulatory environment. Currently in China, the regulatory authorities are positive, open and interested in blockchain technology.

This is China's statement on the rapid development of blockchain technology: adopting a structure similar to the Linux Foundation to form an open source model to develop the Chinese blockchain community. In addition, China is also willing to establish partnerships with other regional or global organizations.

Wanxiang Blockchain Labs helped people realize the opportunities in China's blockchain technology field, as many Chinese organizations expressed strong interest in the technology at the Shanghai Global Blockchain Summit held at the end of 2015.

Zhao Kui, CEO of Neighboring Academy (a Chinese company that provides online language learning), said in an interview with our newspaper that blockchain technology is "about to explode in China." His company is planning to study blockchain technology. Eric Zhao of the Chinese Academy of Sciences also said in an interview that "hot money is slowly flowing in" and he is closely following the development of blockchain.

Almost all banks in the Western world are exploring blockchain technology, and have established a large number of research labs and held countless hackathons. However, China is not making such a big move. They may just pay attention to the development of blockchain technology privately.

According to a Chinese banking industry insider who wishes to remain anonymous:

"The application of blockchain technology in China is very different from that in Western countries. In the United States, banks were the first to adopt this technology, while in China, it may have been adopted first in non-financial fields."
This may be changing. Some professional Chinese developers said that "blockchain will become more and more popular in China" and that regulators also welcome the invention of the technology, but currently lack "actual code for enterprise-level application development."

It is too early to introduce the development of blockchain technology in China, but new companies based on blockchain technology are established almost every day, and people have paid more and more attention to blockchain technology since the end of 2015. Looking around the world, many large IT companies, such as Intel, IBM and Cisco, have established an alliance - Hyperledger, which aims to develop and maintain an open source code protocol to enable smart contracts to be used in an authorized manner in the industry.

At the same time, the R3 Alliance recently announced that Corda will soon become open source (Corda is a blockchain-based financial application protocol). China's ChinaLedger Alliance has also joined it. The three major banks, large IT companies, and outstanding start-ups will all participate in the competition for market share and talent. This may evolve into a global competition to see who will use this emerging technology first.