China Government is very active on the blockchain front – another official research and report came out from China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (CCID) which predicts 2018 to be as successful as 2017 in terms of capital inflow.
In a paper released on May 20, the Chinese Ministry states there have been 249 investment deals in blockchain companies in their country to date.
There have been 60 funding rounds in 2016, which was an five-fold increase to the year before, and 2017 was another strong growth year with almost 100 investment deals. 2018 started off in the same fashion, with 68 investment deals reported in the first quarter alone, alluding another year of accelerating growth.
At the end of March, China had 456 domestic blockchain companies, double as much as of the end of 2016 with 256 companies. The number of new blockchain companies added each year increased from 45 in 2014, to 136 in 2016 and 178 in 2017.
“The industry is developing rapidly with more and more entrepreneurs and capital entering the market,” the whitepaper notes.
Majority of Chinese blockchain companies (295 companies) are working on blockchain applications, with applications in the real economy sectors (109 companies) coming in second, and financial services (86 companies) on third place in the list. 80% of Chinese blockchain companies are based in provinces of Beijing, Shanghai, Guangdong and Zhejiang.
In addition to China’s thriving blockchain startup industry, the country’s reknown technology firms are bumping up blockchain development, the report states. Tencent’s TrustSQL is working on an enterprise level blockchain infrastructure service platform. In the mean time, Alibaba is applying blockchain to non-profit organizations, product traceability, home rental and insurance. Baidu started couple of collaborations to launch China’s first blockchain-supported asset-backed security project and blockchain-based ABS exchange. JD.com is utilizing blockchain for supply chain and product authenticity.
The release of the whitepaper comes on the heels of CCID’s release of its monthly ratings index on 28 cryptocurrencies and the blockchain platforms behind them. Ethereum was the top-ranked cryptocurrency while Bitcoin only came in at 13th place.
China has decided to block access to any cryptocurrency and ICO-related website to anyone within the mainland’s borders.
In April, the government of Hangzhou, the hometown of China’s e-commerce giant Alibaba, said it would invest in a 10 billion yuan (US$1.6 billion) blockchain fund to support blockchain projects.
