China’s former vice-minister for Science and Technology and a well-known digital economics expert, Wu Zhongze, believes that blockchain technology is still quite young. During an interview with The Paper, the former Chinese minister also stated that there was still “not much difference between China and leading economies such as the United States and Europe” to develop blockchain-based ecosystems. He further noted that China has improved across several sectors that are necessary for blockchain development, including hardware manufacturing, platform and security services, industry investment, and financial development.
“Blockchain’s application is accelerating.
The former IT minister said that with the innovative development of blockchain technology and industry, its application is accelerating, and the scale of the industry continues to increase. This field is expected to become a new economic growth point in the future, he added. In what he called the “rapid advancement” of China’s blockchain infrastructure, the former minister stated that distributed technology would bring new opportunities to integrate and develop new technologies such as 5G, artificial intelligence, data centers, and the industrial Internet.
China is ahead in issuing a national digital currency.
The People’s Bank of China is very close to issuing the national digital currency dubbed DCEP to the general public. China will become the first major nation to issue a central bank-backed digital currency. The US is also exploring the idea of having a national digital currency, but it would not become a reality anytime soon. China’s central bank recently completed the biggest trial of its CBDC in Shenzhen, where they issued 10 million yuan to people. Several other central banks across countries are also experimenting with CBDCs. As reported earlier, the Bank of Japan had revealed that it would start experimenting with a central bank-backed digital currency starting next year.
