China Accelerates Efforts to Create National Standards For Blockchain

A Chinese government body is preparing national standards for blockchain ‎and distributed technologies, which will be published by the end of next ‎year, the Economic Information Daily ‎reports.‎

The roadmap involves setting up a technical standardisation committee to identify ‎key stakeholder issues and develop a priority list of standards for development to ‎support blockchain technology. All relevant industries will be invited to participate in the ‎road mapping exercise, said Li Ming, director of the Blockchain Research ‎Office at China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.‎

Mr. Ming said in an interview the efforts will include identifying issues and use ‎cases, defining work streams and developing a ‎draft work ‎program. ‎‎The Chinese official explained that the committee will focus on “basic ‎standard, operating and applying standard, processing and method standard, ‎and information security standard.”

It is also looking into terminology and ‎concepts, security risks and vulnerabilities, identity, distributed data store, point-‎to-point transmission and encryption algorithm.  ‎

The move is a clear indication that China is prepared for blockchain standardization. ‎Now a committee will be formed to lead the effort after the country has been ‎actively pursuing blockchain standardisation efforts through‎ international channels such as the TC 307 committee.

The initiative comes as China is escalating its clampdown on cryptocurrency trading in a bid ‎to finally quash the market completely.

The move is an acknowledgement of the fact that recent ‎attempts to stamp out the crypto ‎frenzy by shutting down ‎service providers at home have failed to ‎completely ‎eradicate the mania that has been sweeping China.‎

China’s raid on the digital asset class, which started in ‎‎September 2017, failed to dampen local investors’ ‎enthusiasm, as many have resorted to online payment ‎accounts and P2P venues to get ‎around the crackdown. ‎