Recently, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology of the People’s Republic of China (MIIT) announced the list of Industrial Internet Support Projects in 2018, encouraging the “national team” to organize a batch of innovative development projects, and establish three functional systems, including network, platform and security, hereby implement the instructions of the State Council on deepening “Internet + advanced manufacturing” development of the industrial Internet. On a global scale, the historic convergence of the digital economy and upgrades of manufacturing industry is setting off a wave of reshaping production methods. According to MIIT’s estimation, China’s industrial Internet development will bring over 3 trillion US dollars of GDP growth in 20 years, which will provide strong impetus to the upgrading of the manufacturing industry and sustained economic growth. The industrial Internet is the support of a new round of scientific and technological revolution, which will bring significant impact to China’s transformation and upgrading, as well as the international status. In order to undertake this strategic opportunity, technological innovation should be an inevitable path.

The key work required by MIIT is applying blockchain technology to the field of industrial Internet. This is to achieve large-scale production synergy based on security and trust. According to the plan, China will establish a public service system for industrial Internet platforms by 2020, promote more than 300,000 industrial enterprises equipped with cloud technology, and cultivate over 300,000 industrial APPs. The blockchain technology solution for the “Construction of Industrial Internet Platform of Public Support System” project was undertaken by the team of Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics (Beihang University). The project leader of the Beihang University project pointed out that it is necessary to fundamentally innovate the blockchain technology to meet the requirements of the booming development of the industrial Internet by taking safety, efficiency and scale into account.

Based on this thought, the Beihang project team selected the innovative blockchain technology tailored for satisfying the demands of industries in the real-world settings. Project leader of the Beihang team said: “We would like to use the technical framework provided by Seele. Their technology selection meets the requirements in the consensus agreement and network structure and, solves the pain point of heterogeneous and large scale of industrial Internet data nodes as well as the high requirement of real-rime data calls.” Dr. Wei Bi, the chief scientist of the blockchain technology company which will cooperate with the “National Team” of the Industrial Internet, responded, “based on the characteristics of the industrial Internet, the technical framework provided by Seele will be gradually upgraded and regenerated. Seele will give versatile results back to the community”.

With the joint support of the government and industry, the blockchain is developing rapidly, and technological innovations are flourishing. Xiong’an Global Promotion Conference held by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in May, announced that it would use the innovative technologies of big data, cloud computing, blockchain, and artificial intelligence to program the Xiong’an smart city brain. SINOCHEM Group took the lead in applying blockchain technology to the petrochemical industry, achieved international trade in petroleum based on blockchain. Innovative technologies such as heterogeneous forests, neural network consensus algorithms, and computing power sharing between inside/ outside chains proposed by the Beihang technical cooperation team will promote the blockchain to be widely used in the real economy and become an important cornerstone of Digital China’s construction.