Both the national team and the large factory team are working hard to break the "blockchain island"

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On May 27th, the Zhongguancun Forum held a parallel forum called "Blockchain+Privacy Computing Development Forum" - Embracing the Future of a Trusted Digital Economy. Since the first blockchain parallel forum was established at the Zhongguancun Forum in 2021, this year's Zhongguancun Forum has continued this setting. Compared to before, the blockchain segment of this year's Zhongguancun Forum is more focused on application scenarios and privacy protection content.

As a cutting-edge technology, blockchain has become an important information infrastructure in global data trading, financial settlement, international trade, government and people's livelihood, and an important engine for the development of the global digital economy. In fact, the numerous parallel forums of this year's Zhongguancun Forum, from chip development to privacy computing, from artificial intelligence to the third-generation internet, cannot be separated from blockchain as the underlying technology. As a key technology in the next generation of technological revolution, blockchain has become a strategic highland that countries must compete for.

The reporter of Beijing Youth Daily learned from the "Blockchain+Privacy Computing Development Forum" that the National Blockchain Technology Innovation Center has been officially put into operation recently. China will accelerate the construction of large-scale blockchain computing power clusters and build a national blockchain computing power network; Build nodes in key industries and key areas of national economy and people's livelihood such as energy and finance, create an open and inclusive national blockchain backbone, and completely break the phenomenon of "blockchain islands".

Fifteen years of blockchain

Widely used in various aspects of modern technology

In total, nearly 15 years have passed since "Nakamoto Cong" first published the classic blockchain document Bitcoin: a point-to-point electronic cash trading system in 2008. Nowadays, blockchain technology has been widely applied in all aspects of modern technology.

Two months after the publication of Nakamoto's paper, the first Genesis block with serial number 0 was born on January 3, 2009. A few days later, on January 9, 2009, a block with serial number 1 appeared and connected to the block with serial number 0 to form a chain, marking the birth of blockchain. Blockchain is a new distributed computing and storage paradigm that integrates multiple existing technologies. Narrowly speaking, blockchain is a chain data structure formed by sequentially connecting data blocks in chronological order. It is a distributed ledger that uses cryptographic methods to ensure that data blocks are tamperproof and unforgeable. This involves mathematics, computer science, cryptography, and economics.

In the following decade or so, the application of blockchain technology has extended to various fields such as digital finance, the Internet of Things, intelligent manufacturing, supply chain management, and digital asset trading, demonstrating broad application prospects.

The construction of the national blockchain computing power network has been initiated

On May 29th, at the parallel forum "Blockchain+Privacy Computing Development Forum" of the Zhongguancun Forum, the National Blockchain Technology (Energy Field) Innovation Center was officially unveiled. The National Blockchain Technology Innovation Center is led by the Beijing Micro Core Blockchain and edge computing Research Institute. The center will accelerate the construction of a large-scale blockchain computing power cluster, build a national blockchain computing power network composed of provincial and municipal backbone node networks and industry application node networks, form a powerful digital infrastructure, and serve a large number of important industries and key fields of the national economy such as cross-border trade, supply chain finance, energy, safety production, and food industry.

Zheng Zhiming, an academician of the CAS Member and a professor of Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, said at the forum that in recent years, China's blockchain has developed at a high speed, and a number of "application chains" have emerged. However, due to the uneven underlying technologies, the fragmentation of technology ecology, and the respective governance of different blockchain application platforms, the phenomenon of "blockchain islands" has become increasingly serious. This new information silo phenomenon has seriously hindered the high-quality development of the digital economy.

Not long ago, the National Blockchain Technology Innovation Center led by the Microchip Research Institute was officially put into operation. The center clearly states that accelerating the construction of a large-scale blockchain computing power cluster, building a national blockchain computing power network, and building nodes in key industries and key areas such as energy and finance for national economy and people's livelihood can create an open and inclusive national blockchain backbone, which can break the phenomenon of "blockchain islands".

A new research and development institution, Microchip Research Institute, has led the development of China's first independently controllable and high-performance blockchain software and hardware technology system, "Chang'an Chain". At present, "Chang'an Chain" is continuously achieving core technological breakthroughs, giving birth to the world's largest supported blockchain open source storage engine, Huge "Hong", and the world's leading blockchain and privacy computing computing cluster, Hive "Beehive". Especially the 'Beehive', which can process 240 million smart contract transactions and perform billions of data privacy calculations per second, has taken on the task of operating large-scale digital economy scenarios.

In terms of application scenarios, Chairman Mao Ke of China Huadian Group Materials Co., Ltd. mentioned at the forum unveiling ceremony that in recent years, China Huadian Group Materials Co., Ltd. has closely cooperated with the "Chang'an Chain" ecological alliance, utilizing China's first independently controllable blockchain software and hardware technology system, "Chang'an Chain", focusing on the difficulties and pain points in the material procurement process, and taking the lead in exploring the integrated application of blockchain in material procurement scenarios. Mao Ke stated that before the application of blockchain technology, e-commerce platforms had issues with mutual trust, data security, and data permissions in various aspects such as bidding, supplier qualification review, major equipment quality management, and internal and external supervision, which greatly affected the efficiency of material procurement business and procurement process supervision, and the quality of major equipment could not be reliably tracked.

Blockchain cannot triangulate "has become an important topic

The main development direction of blockchain technology in Chinese Mainland is alliance chain, which is quite different from overseas business represented by public chain technology. The advantage of alliance chain is that the processing speed is faster than that of public chain. Due to the specified number and identity of nodes, a relatively relaxed consensus mechanism can be used, resulting in a significant improvement in data processing speed compared to public chains. Although the speed of the alliance chain is accelerating, compared to the public chain, the alliance chain is not completely decentralized. In theory, alliance members can jointly modify on chain data. The current domestic policy requirement for the core of the alliance chain is "manageable and controllable".

The information between domestic alliance chains is closed to each other, and the logic, information, and data are not interconnected. A completely open public chain like Ethereum, with multiple institutions participating in an alliance chain, is more like two parallel worlds. The domestic alliance chain can be divided into two teams: Chang'an Chain, Guoxin Public Chain, Spark Chain Network, and BSN, four "blockchain national teams"; Blockchain application solutions represented by internet giants such as Ant Chain, Baidu Super Chain, Tencent Cloud Blockchain, and JD Zhizhen Chain.

During nearly three hours of forum communication, one of the words that Beiqing Daily reporters heard the most was "autonomy and controllability". A senior internet expert stated that autonomy and controllability are an important strategic factor for our development of blockchain technology. This is rarely seen in foreign blockchain forums. Zheng Zhiming, an academician of the CAS Member and professor of Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, pointed out in his speech that decentralization, security and efficiency constitute the "impossible triangle" of blockchain applications. Balancing this paradox is the most important standard to measure the international progressiveness of blockchain technology, the core technology to avoid blockchain application islanding, and the frontier hot issue of competition with advanced countries in Europe and the United States.

A reporter from Beiqing Daily noticed that "blockchain cannot triangulate" has become an important topic in the industry recently. The "impossible triangle" refers to the fact that no blockchain network or system can simultaneously achieve the three goals of decentralization, scalability, and security. Industry experts believe that in a certain sense, the breakthrough in the "impossible triangle of blockchain" is the fundamental driving force for innovation in the underlying technology of blockchain.

Another Solution to Breaking the "Blockchain Island"

The Beiqing Daily reporter flipped through the guest list of the "Blockchain+Privacy Computing Development Forum", but did not find any representatives from Antchain attending the meeting. In fact, just last month, Ant Chain proposed another solution to break the "blockchain islands" between alliance chains. Slightly different from the inward exploration of the national team's main players, the "Dachang Team" chooses to be outward compatible. On April 26th of this year, at the Ant Digital Developers Conference, AntChain announced the official opening up of its heterogeneous cross chain protocol AntChainBridge to global developers. It is reported that this protocol is based on the IEEE cross chain standard and is also the world's first cross chain universal international standard. After open source, developers can use the cross chain code of Ant Chain to transfer assets between different blockchain networks.

According to Ant Group's on-site demonstration, Ant Chain will transmit several NFT commemorative badges to different blockchain networks, including a public blockchain Conflux. Blockchain developers only need to download cross chain plugins in the Ant Chain Openlab section of Github to obtain cross chain system contracts and cross chain business contracts. It can achieve data and asset interoperability between different blockchain networks, and support cross chain operations between various mainstream public and alliance chains. Ant Chain also collaborated with multiple institutions to open a new generation of Web3 open alliance chain in this event. Ant Group stated that the ecosystem is a full stack technology service deployed according to the Web3 four layer architecture, compatible with the world's largest blockchain network Ethereum, and DApps on overseas public chains can also be deployed to alliance chains with one click. It can be seen that both the national team and the "big factory team" are working hard to break the "blockchain island".

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Wen Bingzhao/coordinated by our reporter Zhu Kaiyun/Chi Haibo