Last week, I was fortunate enough to be invited to the city of Hangzhou for the Global Blockchain Financial Summit.

During this trip to China, I learned about the burgeoning Ethereum communities in Beijing, Shanghai, Nanjing and Hangzhou. Every night we hosted an Ethereum meetup and it was standing room only in each city.

DAY 1 — Beijing

Peking University

The first stop on the tour was Peking University, the #1 ranked university in China.

Peking University is a comprehensive and national key university. The campus, known as “Yan Yuan”, is situated at Haidian District in the western suburb of Beijing.The university has effectively combined research on important scientific subjects with the training of personnel with a high level of specialized knowledge and professional skill as demanded by the country’s socialist modernization. Thus Peking University has become a center for teaching and research and a university of a new type, embracing diverse branches of learning such as basic and applied sciences, social sciences and the humanities, and sciences of medicine, management, and education.

Peking University is creating an Ethereum Laboratory to work on protocol improvements and application use cases that effect China, specifically in supply chain and energy markets.

Royal Chinese Mint

The Royal Chinese Mint is the subordinate unit of China Banknote Printing and Minting, which is responsible for the electronic banking mission of China Bank, concentrating on the research and exploration of the forefront of digital money, taking part widely in innovation and practice in the fields such as digital currency, mobile finance, smart-city construction and Internet based finance; it also actively promotes the application of blockchain technology in finance and related fields.

The Royal Chinese Mint is experimenting with the ERC 20 token standard and Ethereum smart contracts to digitize the RMB.

iPayNow

Next stop was iPayNow.

iPayNow uses Quorum, a version of Ethereum incoporating transactional privacy open-sourced by JP Morgan. The company provides aggregated payment service to hundreds of thousands of business clients, such as JD.com, MI, Baidu, Meituan, Ctrip and etc. To them, it is clear that blockchain technology will lead the next generation of mobile payment market.

Day 2 — Nanjing

Nanjing is the capital of Jiangsu province, another key city in Yangtze River Delta Region.

Jiangsu Huaxin BIockchain Research Institute (JBI)

JBI was founded in Dec, 2016. The establishment of the institute is approved by provincial government aiming for promoting industrial upgrading on a strategic level. Currently, JBI focuses mainly on blockchain technology application to industry and personnel training service. JBI has 30 developers and researchers focused solely on Ethereum and have recently translated much of the Ethereum and EEA documentation into Mandarin. JBI will be a powerhouse in the Ethereum-ecosystem and will become a beachhead for corporations outside of China.

Day 3 — Shanghai

Dianrong

Dianrong was founded in Shanghai in 2012 by the co-founder of Lending Club Soul Htite and private fund partner Yuhang Guo focusing on peer-to-peer lenging. It has been expanding quickly with 28 branches and 3500 employees all over China. As a leading fin-tech company, Dianrong started blockchain research in 2015 and spent many efforts on next-generation solutions based on Ethereum, and have open-sourced their permissioned Ethereum iteration, DChain.

Andui

Andui, a founding member of Enterprise Ethereum Alliance, is playing a key role in enterprise ethereum standardization. The core team consists of entrepreneurs, investors, researchers and technical experts. As a pure blockchain company, its main business covers supply chain finance, asset digitization, asset exchange and smart city etc. Andui, the flagship product is fully designed based on ethereum protocol and smart contract with the purpose of deploying ethereum in private or consortium environment.

Day 4 — Hangzhou

Hangzhou is a modern city in a classic Chinese setting. The city hums with activities and an endless flow of traffic, signs of its place in the 21st century, while the beautiful West Lake lies peacefully at the heart of all commotion, soothing the senses. Hangzhou is also famous for hosting the G20 Summit where 20 of the world’s most influential countries gathered to improve Earth.

In eastern China, Hangzhou is the capital of Zhejiang Province and one of the seven capitals of ancient China. The city is also the southern end of the Beijing-Hangzhou Grand Canal, the longest canal ever built in the world.

Nowadays,Hangzhou is aiming at building a Digital City,and the China’s first Blockchain Industrial Park was officially established in Hangzhou.

Ant Financial

Ant Financial, was officially founded in October 2014 and originated from Alipay, which is the world’s leading third-party payment platform founded in 2004. With its vision of “bringing small and beautiful changes to the world,” Ant Financial is dedicated to creating an open ecosystem, enabling financial institutions and partners to make rapid progress towards “Internet+” goals through its “Internet Booster Plan,” and providing inclusive financial services to small and micro enterprises and individual consumers.

Ant Financial runs Alipay, Ant Fortune, Ant Financial Cloud and other financial services. Ant Financial’s invested companies and affiliates also work with these businesses units and support Ant Financial’s ecosystem. The services provided by Ant Financial and its affiliates cover payment, wealth management, credit reporting, private bank and cloud computing.

Ant Financial is experimenting with Ethereum technology to improve their global payment platforms.

CrypTape & ETH Fans

CrypTape, founded by Jan Xie, who is the only core member of ethereum project in China, is working on ethereum protocol level optimization. Their first product CITA, written in Rust, is expected to show the highest performance ever when Ethereum is used in permissioned blockchain for enterprise use cases. Cryptape is also responsible for the Ruby-on-Rails implementation of Ethereum.

ETH Fans

ETH Fans is a the most commonly visited Ethereum website in China. Toya is the main content creator of the site. She is holding her phone showing the Chinese Gnosis WeChat group with 477 people that were speaking about the token launch on the day of the event.

IMToken

IMToken is the first ethereum light wallet in China. This Dapp immediately become popular when formally released by ConsenLabs after one year‘s development because IMToken has designed functionality where users can purchase ether directly from exchanges in a single click, as well as participate in token launches seamlessly.

Day 5 — Global Blockchain Financial Summit

The Global Blockchain Financial (Hangzhou) Summit 2017 was held in Hangzhou International Expo Center on Apirl 28.

Vitalik Buterin gave his insights on why blockchain technology is disrupting the world. Many IT and blockchain companies also took part in the summit and expressed their ideas. The conference was featured with a dedicated EEA forum with more than 1000 people in attendance.

This is just the opening act for the power house that China is.

Xie-xie to all the wonderful friends I made,

Andrew