You Don’t Want Chinese Dominance in Blockchain, Says Head of Industry’s Largest Trade Group

The President of the U.S. Chamber of Digital Commerce has highlighted reasons why she thinks the U.S. has to keep up in the digital currency space in the face of existential dominance threat from China. 

Perianne Boring, while talking about what the Chinese government is doing, notes in her interview that so much is at stake for the U.S. right now in terms of digital currency as she calls for blockchain to be made a national priority. 

“The Communist Party of China has made it one of their missions, highest priorities, to dominate blockchain technology and to quote President Xi Jinping they are using blockchain to gain new industrial advantages,” she told FoxBusiness. 

Digital yuan, Bitcoin and public blockchains linked

“What does this translate into? Let me give you an example: One part of China’s blockchain strategy is to build a faster and more efficient payment system and it’s our understanding that the digital yuan is going to be interoperable with public blockchains like Bitcoin…,” she added, noting that the top cryptocurrency is replacing gold as the monetary layer of the financial system. “There is going to be transaction the layer that sits on top of the Bitcoin network and China is in the process of deploying their digital currency to become that transaction layer.”

The Chamber of Digital Commerce is the world’s largest blockchain trade association with members including J.P. Morgan, BNY Mellon, Binance, BitPay etc. Boring, who had earlier sent a letter to the Biden administration to work towards making the U.S. a leader in the space, points out that China’s PBoC has filed hundreds of patents on the digital currency project which her office has studied. She said:

“They would know all of our activity, they would know all of our spending habits, they would have the ability to surveill at levels never seen before in human history. You do not want the Chinese to have dominance in blockchain technology.”

Blockchain a national priority for U.S.

Several similar calls have been made in the past regarding China’s reported effort to outdo the U.S. in the area of emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence, cloud computing, and blockchain.

The lack of a structured response to the call has seen China gained years ahead of the U.S. in the cyber space race even as it builds the systems and the governance that would power the digital economy hence the call to action.

“We are calling on the Biden and Harris administration to make blockchain a national priority and to establish a national action plan for blockchain to ensure our technical preeminence globally,” says Boring as she identifies some steps that the U.S. can take to achieve the set goal.

“One, we need to have strong statements of support from our political leaders that we do see blockchain as a critical digital infrastructure and we want to lead in the space. The second key to this is empowering our private sector. The private sector is the economic engine of the United States. We need to give businesses the regulatory priority to operate in the US.”