China claims front-runner position in the Blockchain race with the registration of over 500 projects on distributed ledger technology, involving some of the biggest technology companies, Chinese banks, and financial institutions. The Chinese government has taken some very positive strides towards Blockchain technology, with President Xi Jinping announcing his support for DLT, which was closely followed by Congress passing a vital cryptography law.

These recent developments have played a very important role is acting as a booster to the Blockchain development in China. By far two lists have been published by the Cyberspace Administration of China that require every project to be registered under them. The first list came out in March with a total of 197 project names and the second list that had 309 names, was published in October.

The list is expected to grow with the addition of more such projects, but as of now, it involves some of the biggest players in both government and private sector domains.

The Financial Sector:

The financial sector has always been one of the most favored use cases in Blockchain technology. A tally of both the lists has revealed that most of the projects related to the financial sector involve asset management, cross-border payment, supply chain financing, and trade finance. A total of 14 projects have been named under six banks including 2 chief state-owned national banks and 4 local banks.

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2 Blockchain projects have been registered by ICBC (Industrial and Commercial Bank of China) and Ping An Bank (the banking subsidiary of Ping An Insurance).

Union Pay which is the Chinese equivalent of MasterCard or Visa has registered 2 Blockchain projects. It involves a digital certificate application along with a blockchain-based tracking platform for capital transfers of the cross-border kind.

CCB or China Construction Bank, which happens to be one of the major Chinese commercial banks is working on renovating its trade finance blockchain platform. They aim to facilitate any kind of financial transaction.

The Conglomerates:

Baidu which is considered as the search engine giant of China has already filed a patent for Xuper Chain which intends to offer blockchain services with foundational infrastructure. They have also launched a DApp named Letsdog, which is built mirroring the features of CryptoKitties. Baidu launched two more projects, named the Baidu Blockchain Engine for cloud-related services and Token that uses blockchain to guard intellectual property rights of digital content.

Read More: What Future Holds for Blockchain in the Energy Sector?

Alibaba has claimed the top position in filing for the most number of patents related to Blockchain technologies.
Tencent, the parent company of WeChat, has been busy building a host of Blockchain-based services since 2017. It has already registered for Tencent Cloud TBass Blockchain and Tencent Blockchain. Previously they collaborated with Intel on blockchain for IoT applications.

The Government Sector:

The Chinese government has been heavily invested and involved in various Blockchain-based projects to improve their current infrastructure. The list involves both small and large scale projects starting from communications and legal to land development. The Chinese government is directly involved in creating blockchain-based services related to tax collection, legal arbitration, etc.

Both the Internet Courts of Beijing and Guangzhou have registered their respective DLT platforms. More are ongoing showing great promise of reformation for the public sector infrastructure.