China now possesses advanced blockchain technologies and has applied them across many public and business sectors, a national legislator said on Thursday.

Dong Jin, a deputy to the 14th National People's Congress and head of the Beijing Academy of Blockchain and Edge Computing, stated that blockchain began gaining popularity in China before 2019, with trial runs launched in fields such as energy, trade, and government affairs. However, the vast majority of these applications were based on foreign technologies, and China did not have its own core blockchain technologies at that time.

Dong made the remarks at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing before attending the opening meeting of the fourth session of the 14th NPC.

In late 2019, the Beijing municipal government decided to take the lead in this field and quickly assembled hundreds of top scientists from around the world to establish Dong's institute to develop core blockchain technologies collaboratively, according to him.

"Through unremitting efforts, my team and I developed the world's first software-hardware integrated underlying blockchain operating system. All 3 million lines of its source code are fully open-source and freely accessible to the public, which has greatly elevated the social value of the technology," Dong said.

"In the meantime, we developed the world's first 96-core dedicated acceleration chip for blockchain. This chip has improved blockchain performance by 50 times. More importantly, this technology has successfully overcome the computing power bottleneck faced by ultra-large-scale blockchain networks and equipped China's digital infrastructure with a 'Chinese core'."

Currently, their blockchain technologies have been applied by 16 central government departments and 27 State-owned conglomerates, Dong noted.

"For example, in the taxation sector, tens of billions of invoices issued in China every year are all processed on our self-developed blockchain, which ensures that every invoice is authentic, trustworthy, and traceable," he noted.

With the continuous expansion of applications, he stated, a nationwide blockchain network has taken shape to record and safeguard the country's high-value core data about cross-border trades and global payments.