Blockchain is still far from maturity, says China’s former IT minister

He doesn’t seem to think China is that far ahead of the USA when it comes to blockchain development — at least for now.

Wu Zhongze, China’s former vice-minister for Science and Technology and a well-known digital economics expert, believes that blockchain technology is still quite young.

During an interview with The Paper, the former IT minister also stated that there was still “not much difference between where China and leading economies such as the United States and Europe” stand in terms of developing blockchain-based ecosystems.

Wu noted, however, that China has improved across a number of sectors that are necessary for blockchain development, including hardware manufacturing, platform and security services, industry investment, and financial development, adding:

“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.”

In what he called the “rapid advancement” of China’s blockchain infrastructure, the former minister stated that distributed technology will bring new opportunities to integrate and develop new technologies such as 5G, artificial intelligence, data centers, and the industrial Internet.

A recent report by Securities Daily explained how China’s publicly-listed companies spend the millions they have allocated toward blockchain R&D.

The study surveyed 23 companies in China who began working with blockchain back in 2016. Figures suggest that companies allocate an average 20% of their annual revenues toward such purposes. The majority of these funds are spent to further government-related solutions.