China accounts for 84% of all blockchain patent applications, but there’s a catch

Chi­na accounts for 84% of all blockchain appli­ca­tions filed world­wide, accord­ing to the lat­est data shared by the country’s gov­ern­ment official.

Chi­na has steered clear of the cryp­tocur­ren­cy mar­ket. How­ev­er, the Bei­jing gov­ern­ment has been sup­port­ive of the under­ly­ing blockchain tech­nol­o­gy. The coun­try has active­ly pro­mot­ed the use of blockchain tech over the years, and thus the high per­cent­age of blockchain patents isn’t surprising.

Pres­i­dent Xi Jin­ping has also played a key role in pro­mot­ing the nascent blockchain tech­nol­o­gy. In 2019, the Pres­i­dent called upon cit­i­zens, tech com­pa­nies and stake­hold­ers of the ecosys­tem to active­ly par­tic­i­pate and inno­vate with the nascent tech as it would play a key role in the future of the next indus­tri­al revolution. 

As Coin­tele­graph report­ed ear­li­er, Chi­nese com­pa­nies had filed 4,435 blockchain patents with­in one year of Pres­i­dent Xi Jinping’s endorse­ment of the indus­try. Accord­ing to anoth­er study, Chi­na account­ed for rough­ly 60% of the world’s blockchain patent appli­ca­tions from 2015 to June 2021, fol­lowed by the US and South Korea.

The fig­ure was released on Tues­day by Wang Jian­wei, deputy direc­tor of the Min­istry of Indus­try and Infor­ma­tion Tech­nol­o­gy. How­ev­er, the fig­ures didn’t include a time frame in which these patent appli­ca­tions were filed.

Relat­ed: Ten­cent receives patent for blockchain-based miss­ing per­son poster

While Chi­na accounts for the high­est num­ber of blockchain patent appli­ca­tions, the approval rate is sig­nif­i­cant­ly low, with only 19% of the total filed appli­ca­tions get­ting approved, report­ed South Chi­na Morn­ing Post.

Anoth­er impor­tant thing to note here is that Chi­na is not very big on decen­tral­iza­tion, the same prin­ci­ple that blockchain tech is based on. This was evi­dent from the country’s dig­i­tal yuan devel­op­ment, where the cen­tral bank devel­oped the dig­i­tal nation­al cur­ren­cy on the curat­ed ver­sion of a blockchain with full con­trol over its func­tion­ing rather than using the tra­di­tion­al dis­trib­uted net­work approach.