From Banking Giants to Tech Darlings, China Reveals Over 500 Enterprise Blockchain Projects

More than 500 blockchain projects have been registered with the Chinese government since March.

As President Xi Jinping called on his countrymen to seize opportunities in distributed ledger technology, China's industry heavyweights were already leading hundreds of enterprise blockchain projects.

In total, the identities of 506 such projects have been published by the Cyberspace Administration of China, which, since January, has required every entity developing blockchain technologies to register their projects for further supervision.

The information released so far is from two lists - 197 projects named in March and 309 in October - and offers a trove of insight into hundreds of enterprise blockchain projects under development in China.

In total, CoinDesk is able to reveal thumbnail sketches of several enterprise blockchain projects that could change the landscape of the Chinese technology industry.

The bank became the first Chinese financial institution in the R3 enterprise blockchain alliance in 2016, and has adopted a blockchain network called FiMax to improve data-sharing and privacy processes.

ICBC Xi Blockchain Ser­vice and ICBC Fi­nan­cial Ser­vices are blockchain projects to facilitate transactions for the bank's clients.

Another two Baidu projects were included in the March list, including Baidu Blockchain Engine providing cloud services and Token that leverages blockchain to protect digital content intellectual property rights.

The company partnered with Intel to develop a blockchain for Internet of Things applications, while starting to test blockchain financial applications with the Bank of China in 2017.

This month, Chinese media reported the start of a test phase of a Union Pay project, partnered with five other institutions, including China Mobile and the State Information Center, to launch the Blockchain Services Network, a nationwide blockchain infrastructure project envisioned to be the "Android or Apple's IOS system" for the blockchain.