‘It’s Too Hard to Participate’: CWV Partner on China’s Blockchain Blueprint

Collaborating with the government is never easy.

Back in July, the Beijing government released its first blockchain application blueprint concerning government services in China. 

According to Neo Wang, managing partner at public blockchain CWV, this application fell far short for people interested in contributing to the initiative. He told Cointelegraph China that the bar for public chains to collaborate with government service blockchain applications was too high to overcome.

Wang’s comments came during an interview during the Great Bay Area International Blockchain week on August 8. Wang explained, “the compliance threshold of these applications is high, and it is generally difficult to participate in them.”

Enterprises with state-owned shares are more likely to participate in winning the bid, says Wang. He contended that: 

“The cost of the public chain project itself is relatively high, and most of them are entrepreneurial companies, so it is difficult to bid in a protracted way. In particular, there is still a resistance to tokenization in China [...] it is difficult to highlight the advantages of the public chain at the bottom of technology, and it is also difficult to participate in government affairs projects.”

Since Xi’s speech on blockchain last year, China’s government and institutions have promoted a number of Blockchain application projects. Wang said most of these are based on the private chain. 

Data sharing and collaboration among government sectors are the main focus for making implementing blockchain in government service applications a success. However, state owned operations could limit the number of decentralized nodes to participate. This could make the whole government service blockchain network less decentralized. He explained that:

“We believe that the compliance threshold of these applications is relatively high. From the perspective of consensus mechanism, the trusted mechanism with government credibility as the endorsement of nodes is still very different from the public chain infrastructure.” 

When this happens, it may need to cooperate with the public chain at the application level. Wang added that: “Similarly, when the alliance chain of various government projects and commercial institutions needs to expand peripheral business and global development, it may need cross chain collaboration with public chains.”

As Cointelegraph reported previously, the Beijing government released its first blockchain application blueprint for government services. It claimed that 140 applications already use the technology.