According to “2017 Ranking List of Patents for Top 100 Global Blockchain Enterprises” jointly issued by IPRdaily Chinese version and incoPat Innovation Index Research Center recently, China is leading in terms of blockchain research in the world. As pointed out by insiders, Chinese government paid special attention to the research on blockchain technology and encouraged its application and development. However, as blockchain technology is at the early development stage, it may cost long to overturn the traditional business logic.

The number of “PBoC’s patents” ranks first

It was said that “2017 Ranking List of Patents for Top 100 Global Blockchain Enterprises” includes invention patents, patents for utility models and appearance patents. The list shows China is leading worldwide in terms of blockchain research. Among all these enterprises, Chinese enterprises (7 enterprises) account for 49%, followed by US (2 enterprises only). Among the top 10, there were 7 Chinese enterprises and 2 US enterprises.

Among the top 100, there are altogether blockchain patents applied by Digital Currency Research Institute of PBoC, ranking the 3^rd, 22 patents of People's Bank of China Print Science Technical Research Office, ranking the 8^th and 13 patents of ZhongChao Creditcard Industry Development Co., Ltd., a subordinate under PBoC, ranking the 18^th. The total quantity of the three reaches 68, far more than 43 of Alibaba Group, ranking the first within the globe.

This coincides with the statement of Zhou Xiaochuan, the former president of PBoC in the NPC & CPPCC---PBoC started to pay attention to emerging financial technology such as digital currency, blockchain and distributed ledger technology very early and also involves in the R & D of them with the industry.

Zhou Xiaochuan said PBoC organized relevant digital currency seminars and established research institute 3 years ago. It is organizing distributed R & D with the industry

“Chinese government grants full support for the research of blockchain technology, encourages its application and development and provides financial support for some fundamental technical research and application”, said by Yu Linmin, the CTO of e-Finance when receiving the exclusive interview of the journalist.

“However, the substantial change of blockchain technology needs the further development of underlying technology, just like IOS and Android powerful fundamental systems for mobile internet. Regardless of the huge investment for the fundamental technology, many R & D teams work separately and a real leading technical enterprise has not appeared yet”, Yu Linmin told the journalist.

Future development or partial breakthrough

Thanks to the policy encouragement, blockchain industry has welcomed its fast development period and many blockchain companies appeared one after another. At the same time, the concept stocks of blockchain raise all. On this occasion, a lot of listed companies such as Baofeng Group, Meitu and Thunder all rush for blockchain. Their stock price has been increased dramatically although most of them have not started to deal with relevant business.

Not long ago, Xu Xiaoping, the steersman of ZhenFund said in their internet WeChat group “blockchain revolution has come and it is a great technical revolution that everyone must follow if they want to survive. Embrace blockchain technology instead of desiring only with no action or seeing its development with indifference. Go and involve it quickly”.

However, most insiders believe the decentralization of the blockchain technology, which may overturn the traditional business logic, might not be realized in one day due to its early development stage. Yu Linmin said to the journalist, “I think it may cost long if using blockchain to change our lives, just as internet does. The future development of blockchain application needs to start with partial breakthroughs”.

 Yu Linmin believed the extreme application of blockchain at present was the digital cryptocurrency represented by Bitcoin and other strong blockchain-based applications had not been noticed. He further pointed out that the applications that might be broken through by blockchain first included cross-border payment, identity verification, insurance and digital copyright. “First, the development of blockchain technology is under initial stage so it cannot be used for high frequency transaction perfectly; second, blockchain technology is not provided with a relatively unified and more reasonable underlying architecture, agreement, security system and technical development specification; third, blockchain needs to find a more proper application scenario”.