In mid-April, the US Department of Commerce barred American companies from selling their telecommunications equipment—including chips— to the Chinese smartphone maker ZTE, heightening the fear that the country’s reliance on imported chips could undermine China’s future economic and national security goals.

While looking to speed up chip plans, China still needs to pay attention to the blockchain industry ,especially the development of blockchain infrastructure to avoid facing the embarrassing situation brought by the over-reliance on the imported key foreign technologies. A Chinese blockchain lawyer shared his advice on how can domestic companies gain upper hand in the worldwide blcockhain competition in a recently published article.

Blockchain Infrastructure

Generally speaking, blockchain infrastructure refers to the facilities that provide public services for the development of blockchain technology, industry and application. The facilities will ensure the normal operation of blockchain-based economic and social activities.

The lawyer thinks blockchain infrastructure falls into two categories, one is the key technologies that support blockchain to survive and develop, including storage, encryption, consensus, and cross-chains technologies; the other is a number of mature and stable public blockchains.

In his opinion, bitcoin is a strategic resource, because bitcoin blockchain is the most stable public blockchain and bitcoin itself is the most stable digital asset, which has been accepted by an increasing number of people.

Blockchain technology is still in the infancy stage which features the competition of public blockchains. In the future, we might see only one or two public blockhain to “survive” in every field after a fierce competition across the world. Afterward, public blockchains will at a stable pace, and many other applications will be built upon these public blockchain survivors.

Urgent Demand for Key Blockchain Infrastructure in China

In recent years, China’s blcochain industry grows keeping pace with the world. China has not lagged behind other countries in the research of key blockchain-related technologies storage , such as cryptography, consensus mechanism and cross-chain. The public blockchains that are developed by Chinese founding team have also delivered impressive performance so far.

But Chinese government’s ban on cryptocurrency trading and ICO exerts direct impacts: Affect the public blockchains’ development and application in vertical industries; Affect the institutional investors to learn and support public blockchains; Affect the popularization of blockchain basic knowledge and the use of digital assets; Affect Chinese regulators to amass experience in blockchain supervision.

Although the tough policies have not hinder the growth of the blockchain industry in this countries, China should still attach great importance to the research and application of key blockchain technologies in terms of storage, encryption,consensus and cross-chain , and pay more attention to the development and application of public blockchains, enabling China to have a say in the blockchain-based economic system.