China accounts for 84% of all blockchain applications filed worldwide, according to the latest data shared by the country’s government official.
China has moved away from the cryptocurrency market. However, the Beijing government has supported the underlying blockchain technology. The country has actively promoted the use of blockchain technology over the years, so the high percentage of blockchain patents is not surprising.
President Xi Jinping has also played a key role in promoting the nascent blockchain technology. In 2019, the President called on citizens, technology companies and ecosystem stakeholders to actively engage and innovate with emerging technology as it would play a key role in the future of the next industrial revolution.
As previously reported by Cointelegraph, Chinese companies had filed 4,435 blockchain patents in a year following President Xi Jinping’s endorsement of the industry. According to another study, China accounted for approximately 60% of the world’s blockchain patent applications from 2015 to June 2021, followed by the US and South Korea.
The figure was released on Tuesday by Wang Jianwei, deputy director of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology. However, the figures did not include a time period in which these patent applications were filed.
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Although China accounts for the highest number of blockchain patent applications, the approval rate is significantly low, with only 19% of the total applications filed, the South China Morning Post reported.
Another important thing to note here is that China is not very big on decentralization, the very principle that blockchain technology is based on. This was evident from the development of the country’s digital yuan, where the central bank developed the national digital currency on the selected version of a blockchain with full control over its operation instead of using the traditional approach of distributed network.
