The Government of China has announced members of its national blockchain committee, a team set to work on setting industrial standards within the country.
According to the announcement by China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), the committee named “National Blockchain and Distributed Ledger Technology Standardization Technical Committee,” was formed after the approval from the National Standardization Management Committee.
The blockchain committee comprises of 71 members, and will be chaired by MIIT deputy minister Chen Zhaoxing, with notable members from the central bank, Chinese tech giants Baidu, Huawei, Tencent, and representatives from its national universities.
At this time, the MIIT is seeking public opinion on the committee members until May 12 2020, urging individuals to send in their reservations on any of the listed or omitted parties.
Statistics from global patent offices show China filed the highest number of blockchain patent applications in 2019, with a total of 5,800 at the time of this publication.
Tencent and its affiliates filed the most applications with 718 in 2019, followed by Alibaba Group with 470; that is about 20% of the total fillings worldwide.
Other big companies with patents outside China include: IBM (52), Walmart (64), Siemens (38), Microsoft (23), MasterCard(20), Bank of America (23), among others.
Analysts predict a spring of more blockchain patents as interest and utility of blockchain technology soars.
It will be recalled that last year, China’s President Xin Jinping had called for speedy adoption of blockchain technology in the country.
“We must take blockchain as an important breakthrough for independent innovation of core technologies, clarify the main directions, increase investment, focus on a number of key technologies, and accelerate the development of blockchain and industrial innovation.”
– Xi Jinping, President People’s Republic of China.
