Of late, authority in China’s eastern city Hangzhou has completed the construction and test run of the “Government Service Chain”, the first blockchain-powered underlying system for government affairs.

Under the initiative of the Hangzhou Data Resources Management Bureau, the system was technically supported by local blockchain project Bytom. Based on the requirements of government affairs in terms of security and efficiency, the system adopts Bystack’s one-mainchain + multi-sidechain architecture, and initially sets up four blockchain nodes. The test run, started in May this year with a total of more than 3 million blocks generated in the past 6 months, has actually powered many application scenarios.

The construction of this system indicates that the city’s Data Resources Management Bureau has basically acquired the building capacity on blockchain, and it also means that in the future, there will be independent and controllable blockchain underlying support in multiple government affairs and blockchain scenarios.

Ma Qianli, CEO of Bytom’s Bytack and vice president of 8btc, said that contrary to POC (Proof of Concept) product, the Government Service Chain was released after six months of test run and a bunch of research work, which will make progress with the blockchain plus government services model and serve the people with better e-government experience.

In the future, more applications (dapps) will run on the upper layer of the Government Service Chain, to build a more prosperous ecology; In addition, more nodes will join in it, with more local government departments brought in to make the underlying chain more robust.

At present, the blockchain system has been initially applied in the trusted identity authentication scenario in Hangzhou.

When residents conduct business at authority bodies, they usually need to undergo identity authentication which is information from higher authorities to meet their specific needs. At present, the identity information will also be synchronized into the Government Service Chain, so that residents’ identity information can have more validity period and wider application scope. Once the information is put onchain, they don’t have to get data from the superior department back and forth, thus improving the work efficiency. In the future, as more departments become nodes of the chain, it will be more convenient to coordinate government affairs across departments, cities, and provinces.

Prior to it, the city has leveraged blockchain technology in evidence repository for the local judicial department, in waste sorting as well as in the license-plate lottery. Apart from the technology adoption, Hangzhou has set up a $1.6 billion government-backed blockchain fund early in 2018. The Government Service Chain indicates local authorities’ ambition of using blockchain to facilitate their work and better serve the people.

In response to China’s President Xi Jinping’s endorsement for blockchain on October 25, both enterprises and government authorities in the country have been speeding up their efforts in blockchain adoption.