China at forefront of global blockchain boom

"Use cases leveraging on blockchain are maturing as well, filtering out the overhyped or solutions overselling the technology from the implementations where blockchain brings value to ecosystems," Xie said in the report.

"The technology is here to stay, organizations need to assess the benefits that blockchain can bring to the business like the way it assesses other emerging technology, and identify realistic areas of implementation where the technology can reduce costs and increase efficiency. With proper analysis, leveraging the adoption of blockchain can assist organizations to enhance their digital transformation journey," Xie added.

Seeing the big potential of the blockchain sector, many tech companies are gearing up to expand blockchain-related business, and many have already made considerable progress.

Chinese internet titan Tencent has worked closely with the tax bureau in Shenzhen in Guangdong province to roll out blockchainbased invoicing. And the first blockchain-based invoice was issued to a local restaurant in Shenzhen in August 2018.

So far, the blockchain-based invoice system has rapidly covered a wide range of industries, including financial insurance, wholesale, retail, hotels, catering, property management, car parking, transportation and internet services in Shenzhen.

As of Dec 24, 2019, Shenzhen had issued more than 14.2 million blockchain-based invoices, amounting to 9 billion yuan ($1.3 billion).

Li Maocai, general manager of blockchain technology at Tencent, said Xi's remarks highlighted the key role of blockchain technologies, which will largely boost the future development.

"Cryptocurrency is just one among the many applications of blockchain," Li said. "With the government's strong support, blockchain companies, experts and institutes will accelerate their push for making breakthroughs in the underlying technologies and overcoming the current technological bottlenecks, which will definitely inject new impetus into the whole industry."

According to him, more efforts are needed to integrate blockchain with cloud computing, big data, the internet of things and other new technologies to deal with real-world problems, and Tencent will continue to explore applications in blockchain games, supply chain finance, blockchain-based invoicing and more.

Chinese blockchain giant Xunlei is also getting serious about carving out a stake in the rapidly expanding blockchain sector.

Currently, Xunlei has applied for more than 100 blockchain patents, mainly in the core underlying technologies.

As of October 2019, the company had introduced products covering more than 10 industries, including environmental protection, telecommunications, traceability, biotechnology, live services, digital media, information services, advertising, public welfare, catering, insurance and copyright.

Xunlei's partners included the Copyright Protection Center of China, digital marketing service provider Hylink and Naresuan University Hospital in Thailand, the company said.

Lai Xin, chief engineer of Xunlei's ThuderChain blockchain platform, said as the government has shown great resolve in embracing blockchain, a wide range of blockchain projects will emerge in 2020.

"In the long run, the key is to focus on the application of blockchain technologies," Lai noted. "Currently, the difficulty lies in the willingness of some enterprises and institutions to apply blockchain as well as the talent shortage. More efforts are needed to cultivate talents with a big-picture thinking and cryptography professionals."