New article mentioning the Qtum project at TheVerge"Another example of China’s unique take on the blockchain resulting in interesting technological vectors is the Qtum project. Qtum, pronounced "Quantum", is a turing-complete smart contract blockchain, combining its own version of the Ethereum Virtual Machine with a Bitcoin blockchain. The result is a blockchain stack, able to execute ethereum-like smart contracts in mobile environments such as Smartphones, Tablets and IoT devices, which the company’s leadership recognized as the most necessary feature for corporate and government blockchain adoption.
Furthermore, Qtum plans to incorporate a smart contract template hub in its service, which will make it easy to write financial applications which adhere to commercial rules and regulations and which utilize digital identities."
By tanvirzafar on May 11, 2017 07:14 am
For Western audiences, especially crypto enthusiasts, China and the Blockchain may seem like slightly strange bedfellows. Thinking about anonymous Bitcoin hero, Satoshi Nakamoto and his colorfully diverse followership, the People’s Republic’s central planners are not the first to come to one's mind. In light of this, Beijing’s decision from earlier this year to include Blockchain technologies in the Communist Government’s upcoming 5 year plan, might have struck many as surreal.
On the ground however, the numbers tell a much less ambiguous story. With $10 Billion flooding the country’s fintech sector alone, China moved in 2016 to the third place globally in Blockchain investments. The PBC, China’s Central Bank, is actively endorsing this tendency and is investing "significant resources" in the technology while encouraging the Republic’s financial sector to investigate blockchains with the goal of increasing transparency and countering fraud.
Better known for their tendency towards pragmatism and efficiency than for their love for decentralization and libertarian ideals, China’s economic stewardship has reasons of its own to pursue a leading role in the crypto industry. Namely, China simply believes that blockchains are a reasonable method to digitize trade. This cautious and down-to-earth attitude of the country’s leadership seems to have its impact on the local entrepreneurial scene. Leading Chinese blockchain projects put much less emphasis on the somewhat revolutionary rhetoric we are used to from their Western colleagues, and don’t shy away from making their platforms suitable for a world in which government regulations and know-your-customer rules are a given fact.
One company, Metaverse, has made this Zeitgeist into its official mission statement. Proposing a blockchain environment in which people, organizations, and governments can transact with each other, using digital identities and verifying agents, Metaverse chooses a tone very different from most projects of its kind.
In an interview from late 2016, the company’s CEO and founder, Eric GU, stated that "at Metaverse, we don’t believe that the blockchain will get rid of middlemen. [...] Ultimately, we should respect them. Many blockchain projects want to get rid of middlemen. Metaverse celebrates them, governments, organizations, people, professionals. They have a critical role to play in identity and reputation."
While western projects struggle to make peace between their adherence to absolute decentralization and anonymity and the need to interface with a global economy, requiring regulatory checks and balances, their Chinese competitors are much more interested in making the blockchain business ready as soon as possible. This attitude, albeit less trendy among the community followership, has recently generated a great deal of interest among global institutional investors and very often dictates the problems these teams try to solve.
The Antshares project’s goal, for example, is to allow for the digitalization of real-world financial assets, such as shares and securities. The idea behind Antshares is not to create yet another crypto market for tokens, essentially devoid of any real-world backing, but rather to create a cryptographic platform on which shares, bonds and other highly regulated securities, backed by corporate profits and liabilities, can be traded.
This, very often, also has technological implications. Antshares chose the dBFT consensus mechanism for its blockchain, making it so that the system is secured against potential forking events and allows for transaction volumes comparable to those of centralized clearing systems such as Visa and the like - A choice until now made only by highly institutionalized western projects such as hyperledger.
Another example of China’s unique take on the blockchain resulting in interesting technological vectors is the Qtum project. Qtum, pronounced "Quantum", is a turing-complete smart contract blockchain, combining its own version of the Ethereum Virtual Machine with a Bitcoin blockchain. The result is a blockchain stack, able to execute ethereum-like smart contracts in mobile environments such as Smartphones, Tablets and IoT devices, which the company’s leadership recognized as the most necessary feature for corporate and government blockchain adoption.
Furthermore, Qtum plans to incorporate a smart contract template hub in its service, which will make it easy to write financial applications which adhere to commercial rules and regulations and which utilize digital identities.
In the light of this, the People’s Bank of China Vice Governor Fan Yifei’s statement, urging central banks across the globe to "lead on digital currency development", should come as no surprise. "The conditions are ripe for digital currencies" Fan wrote in a guest article for Bloomberg, claiming that cryptocurrencies "can reduce operating costs, increase efficiency and enable a wide range of new applications."
In his article, Fan also claimed that government regulation can remedy many of the current shortcomings of cryptocurrencies, such as unstable value, weak credibility and lack of acceptance. A cryptographic legal tender, argues Fan, holds the potential of combining the advantages of current and alternative currency systems.
If this attitude will remain in place, would the dynamics of decentralized crypto-markets conflict with the PRC’s view of things, remains to be shown. With this kind of institutional backing, however, China will be, and already is, a safe haven for many blockchain projects escaping the saturated western markets.
