Chinese MIIT Wants to Inspire More Blockchain Adoption

The Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) is holding an internal discussion about methods it could apply to get more companies on the blockchain bandwagon, according to local mainland media.

In fact, the MIIT has already put together a couple of proposals on how it would be able to make blockchain technology more mainstream in the country as well as a statement clarifying that the ecosystem itself is a priority in the ministry’s agenda.

Currently, China is one of the world leaders when it comes to blockchain technology development, but there’s very little progress in the way of adoption, perhaps signaling to the organization that it should focus more on inspiring developers to make products that corporations would want to use.

To assist in portraying just how hyped the whole phenomenon has become in the country, we can point to a mid-July report that reveals that more than 4,000 Chinese companies from various industries use the word “blockchain” in their names. It would be reasonable to doubt that many of these companies actually develop worthwhile blockchain solutions.

If we were to take the Chinese translation of blockchain—qukualian—and look at how many companies have integrated it into their names, we find an additional 3,078 entities registered as commercial operators between January 1 and July 16 of this year alone.

The MIIT’s suggestion for promoting adoption is to call upon the country’s IT industry to “unite” under one banner, with the hope that blockchain applications would be developed on an “industrial” scale.

However, promoting further development of blockchain solutions for the sake of developing more of them doesn’t guarantee that the platforms that appear on the horizon would be adopted. For this, there needs to be some level of quality to the work being done.

Ultimately, China’s private sector could wield a tremendous amount of power on its own, letting the market decide the value of blockchain projects and anticipate the demand for them. After all, there are many economically liberal hubs in the mainland that could become incubators for very clever projects.