“From my observation, China’s blockchain research and development is still in its early stage. Not only in China, even in the world, there are no real breakthrough in terms of the core technology of blockchain.” Li Lihui said on Boao Forum on 24th March as per a local report.



Li, ex-President of the Bank of China, is the director of Blockchain working group of China Internet Finance Association

Although blockchain technology is a trendy word, few people can make an accurate definition of it. Li Lihui thinks that the so-called blockchain is a distributed public ledger built and maintained upon the participant’s consensus mechanism. It is a combination of innovations with a variety of technologies, which includes the data structure based on chronological order, an operating system based on the consensus algorithm, the generation and execution based on smart contract rules and the p2p network based on encryption algorithm.

As per Li Lihui, currently there are 3 domains that are considered as the core technology of the bottom layer of blockchain. They are the consensus algorithm, the encryption algorithm. and the smart contract. China or other countries, even large organization like IBM, has not made a real breakthrough in these three underlying technologies. That is an industrial level breakthrough has not yet been reached. The so-called industrial level means that the system is capable to at least two thousand or more transactions to meet financial requirements. Right now all blockchain applications are running in a low-traffic low-frequency environment.

“At present, several institutions claims that they have achieved preliminary results in terms of blockchain applications. The Postal Savings Bank announced the launch of an asset custody system, partnering with IBM. They have claimed that hundreds of transactions were conducted in the real environment, but they didn’t disclose that these hundreds of transactions were completed in less than a second or within a few days. The second case is that WeBank and China Resources Bank launched a joint loan clearing and settlement system. But it’s a multi-system as the system itself cross two platforms.”

The Bo’ao forum has a dedicated workshop for “Digital currency and Blockchain” on 24th March, which is being reported live via 8btc forum.