China’s ambition with blockchain has just taken a new step. Today the new cluster subsidized by the Chinese government has been announced. And it is undoubtedly one of the most ambitious projects with this technology known worldwide. While the West continues to take steps to block China’s access to high technology, the Asian country continues to invest in its own technology.
China is proud of its new cluster located in the capital, Beijing. We are looking at a group of 1,000 servers that promises a capacity to execute up to 240 million transactions of smart contracts per second.
The project is being led by a local platform: ChainMaker. It is a group of companies oriented to the development of this technology. And it is not the first announcement they have made, since in the middle of last year they reported the development of a own chip of 96 cores, focused on blockchain transactions and the promise that it would even allow secure communications against attacks from quantum computers.
Collaborating with the project is not only this consortium, but also the Beijing Academy of Blockchain and Edge Computing, which has lent the space and had previously announced that it was developing storage systems in the petabyte scale. At the moment the top500 list only has two supercomputers in its top10 and none in the top5.
The core of the cluster will be located in the northern district of the science city of Zhongguancun, in Beijing. And as described by Beijing Daily, this cluster will be used by the Chinese authorities for the security and control of transactions of 80 departments, 16 districts and all kinds of organizations.
Blockchain to monitor everything
The possible uses by China of blockchain technology cover all kinds of situations. The description made by the Chinese media of the uses leaves no doubt about the ambition they have: “Reservation of personal trips, hotels, online purchases, hospital registration, financial settlement between companies, exchange of information between government departments… behind each scenario, under the premise of guaranteeing data security and privacy, data verification, evidence traceability and payment transactions”.
Those responsible explain that have already generated more than a million lines of open source and that this cluster will be constantly active and updated.
The companies supporting the ChainMaker-led consortium include all the major players in the country, from the China Construction Bank to the central bank’s Digital Currency Research Institute, including China Unicom and Tencent.
China’s position on cryptocurrencies has traditionally been the opposite. Although the blockchain is being seen as an opportunity and investment is being made for its internationalization. The construction of a more powerful cluster for the blockchain can not only be seen from the point of view of the government, but also from the companies themselves, such as Tencent, which are building your cloud platforms about her.
While the crypto sector is not experiencing its best moments in the West, important companies are already appearing in China. voices that believe that the country fully embraces this technology. This is the case of a former adviser to the Bank of China, who has argued that China should reconsider the blockade of cryptocurrencies.
What seems clear is that China sees in blockchain technology not just a financial mechanism, but a tool to further boost its meticulous control over everything that happens there.
Imagen | Beijing Daily
