Recently such outlets as Financial Times reported that China just snapped up the number one spot for the greatest number of patents pertaining to blockchain technology over any other country in the world. This is just one of the latest moves within a massive amount of activity inside this emerging tech space. Whether any implications arise from actions as a result of U.S. tariffs, one thing is clear. The race is on grab the title of innovation lead within a sector that has barely even begun to truly take flight.
First, there are a number of reasons why so many in tech are breathlessly exploring and elbowing into the blockchain proposition and its projected, far-reaching power. “I think this particular space has something way more behind it than just the technology or innovation,” explains David Marshall, Founding Partner, 08Capital, a self-described hybrid Blockchain and stock market-style venture capital fund to work with companies and advise them. “It literally has a real, live energetic movement of human emotion. This technology has potential to have a great impact on everything we do and will definitely be threaded through all technology in the future. is quite simply, disruptive tech with massive potential given global adoption.”
And those involved in this industry who are based in China are positioning themselves for leading spots on the global playing field.
For example, Technologies, the cloud computing arm of Xunlei Limited, a leading cloud-based acceleration technology company in China, recently announced that it launched a high-performance blockchain platform called ThunderChain, which can concurrently conduct millions of transactions per second. ThunderChain is designed to realize confirmation and interaction among homogeneous chains and enable multiple transactions to be executed on different chains in parallel.
Part of the allure of this new move is that ThunderChain supports smart contracts written in solidity language and is compatible with Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), making it easy to migrate applications from other blockchain platforms.
The company takes a unique approach to the progression of blockchain technology believing that Bitcoin’s rise to popularity, largely due to its investment value, can be categorized as Blockchain 1.0. Ethereum’s adoption as a decentralized platform for a limited set of applications is what Xunlei categorized as Blockchain 2.0.