On 17th September 2018, the Chinese Center for Information Industry Development (CCID) posted rankings that revealed new aspects of its analysis of blockchain technology implementations by various cryptocurrencies. CCID is a research group working under China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.

On viewing the Chinese rankings, it may appear a bit odd as it differs from numerous other worldwide rankings that usually place Bitcoin in first place. Dr Songtau Pu, leader of the CCID public blockchain technical assessment group, explained the reason for this saying that the ranking does not indicate how well the cryptocurrencies perform. It instead functions as an evaluation of the blockchains from a purely technical point of view. This is the fourth iteration it has issued this year.

The first was in May where Ethereum took the lead and Bitcoin was ranked in 13th place. This came as a surprise to many. The second iteration was posted in June where Bitcoin further dropped to 17th place and EOS beat Ethereum taking first place. The third one was in July where EOS maintained its position while Bitcoin only managed to take a step up by settling at 16th place.

In the recent posting, EOS still continues to shine at the very top and Bitcoin has taken a huge leap to be in the top 10 overtaking 6 other cryptocurrencies. The report stated that that Bitcoin’s lead expanded due to its recent code update which is very active giving it a score of 40.3 under innovation and creativity.

The criteria used in ranking

There are three factors taken into consideration during the research. The cryptocurrencies earn points under three categories which are then added up to produce the final score that determines the overall ranking.

The first category (in the first column of the report), is basic technology. The basic technology mainly evaluates the technical level of the current public chain including evaluation of functions, performance, security and decentralization. This is the factor that has kept EOS in the lead. It currently the highest score pf 104.3.

The second category is applicability, which mainly examines the comprehensive ability of the public chain to support practical applications, including node deployment, wallet application, development support and application implementation. Ethereum leads in this category beating NEO by only 0.1.

The third and final category is creativity & innovation. This area has been dominated by Bitcoin. It focuses on continuous innovation in public chain open source code, including the number of contributors, code updates, and code impact.

From all this information it is clear that CCID does not look at the cryptocurrencies as assets, but rather as manifestations of blockchain technology.