China's Communist Party Central Committee and State Council on Oct. 9, 2026, published a 19-measure policy opinion directing the construction of a national blockchain network and an integrated computing power grid. The directive, which sits alongside manufacturing modernization and data infrastru...
"Within decades, all information systems will rely on blockchain transmission." — He Yifan, CEO, Red Date Technology (BSN developer)
China's Communist Party Central Committee and State Council on Oct. 9, 2026, published a 19-measure policy opinion directing the construction of a national blockchain network and an integrated computing power grid. The directive, which sits alongside manufacturing modernization and data infrastructure mandates, treats distributed-ledger technology as sovereign infrastructure — not a financial product. No mention of Bitcoin or cryptocurrency trading appears in the document.
The policy builds on a $54.5 billion blockchain roadmap unveiled in 2025, the existing Blockchain-based Service Network (BSN) operating across 120+ domestic city nodes and 20+ foreign countries, and the digital yuan (e-CNY) system that has processed 16.7 trillion renminbi (~$2.3 trillion) in cumulative transactions. It comes five years after Beijing's outright ban on crypto trading and mining — a ban the Oct. 9 document does nothing to reverse.
The result is a state-directed blockchain apparatus with no Western analogue: permissioned chains for domestic industry, a crypto-free international export product (BSN Spartan), and a CBDC settlement layer (Project mBridge) that has processed $55.5 billion in cross-border transactions while bypassing SWIFT entirely.
The document released by China's top governing bodies contains 19 measures aimed at integrating digital tools with traditional industries. The blockchain-specific provisions call for:
The document explicitly warns officials to "avoid economic bubbles." Implementation oversight falls to the Central Financial and Economic Affairs Commission and the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC). No operator, technical specification, budget, or timetable has been disclosed.
Chinese banks received parallel guidance encouraging blockchain use in tax-data sharing and business lending. The State Administration of Taxation and the National Financial Regulatory Administration promoted "standardized information sharing between banks, tax authorities and businesses" via distributed-ledger infrastructure.
The Oct. 9 directive does not start from zero. China's Blockchain-based Service Network, operational since 2020, already functions as a state-backed blockchain backbone. Key metrics:
| Metric | Figure | |---|---| | Domestic city nodes | 120+ | | Countries with BSN presence | 20+ (via BSN Spartan) | | Founding partners | State Information Center, China Mobile, China UnionPay | | Developer | Red Date Technology | | Architecture | Permissioned; mandatory real-identity registration |
BSN's design is explicitly anti-crypto. The network requires identity verification, enforces state content standards, and retains transaction rollback capabilities. BSN Spartan, the international version, operates from a Singapore-based foundation and uses AWS and commercial cloud providers in Hong Kong, the U.S., and Europe — but remains crypto-free.
Red Date Technology has partnered with Dubai-based Singularity Innovations to push BSN Spartan into the Middle East and Africa. Secretary General Tan Min has described the project's ambition as building an internet backbone where "China controls the right to internet access."
The e-CNY is the transactional layer atop China's blockchain infrastructure. By December 2025, the system had processed:
| Metric | Figure | |---|---| | Cumulative transactions | 3.4 billion | | Cumulative value | 16.7 trillion RMB (~$2.3 trillion) | | Monthly transaction volume | ~200 billion RMB (~$28 billion) | | Individual wallets opened | ~1.8 billion (early 2026) | | Corporate wallets | 18.84 million | | Pilot cities/regions | 26 | | Authorized operating banks | 30 (as of Aug. 2026) |
Two structural shifts occurred in January 2026. First, the People's Bank of China (PBOC) began paying interest on e-CNY wallet balances at demand-deposit rates — making China's CBDC the first globally to offer returns to ordinary holders. Second, the PBOC reclassified e-CNY as deposit liabilities rather than digital cash, a move that aligns the instrument with the banking system's balance sheet.
In September 2026, the PBOC established the RMB International Operations Center in Shanghai, a blockchain-based services platform designed to develop on-chain settlement tools and cross-chain transfer capabilities for international digital yuan use.
Project mBridge is the external settlement arm of China's blockchain strategy. Originally co-developed with the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) and central banks in Hong Kong, Thailand, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia, the platform has processed over 4,000 cross-border transactions totaling approximately $55.5 billion — a roughly 2,500x increase from its early 2022 pilot phase.
China's digital yuan accounts for approximately 95% of settlement volume on the platform.
The BIS formally exited mBridge in October 2024, handing full governance to the participating central banks' Steering Committee. The BIS is now focused on Project Agorá, a Western-aligned alternative. In June 2026, the Bank of Mongolia joined mBridge as a full Steering Committee member. Saudi Arabia, however, has reportedly withdrawn from the project.
The divergence is significant. The BIS exit and the emergence of competing Western projects (Agorá) suggest that multilateral CBDC interoperability is fragmenting along geopolitical lines rather than converging.
The Oct. 9 blockchain directive is tethered to China's "East Data, West Computing" (EDWC) infrastructure program, which provides the physical compute and storage backbone. By mid-2024:
The blockchain network announced Oct. 9 would run atop this physical infrastructure, giving the state end-to-end control from silicon to settlement layer.
China holds an outsized share of the global blockchain patent landscape. Chinese entities filed over 90% of all blockchain-related patents globally in 2023, according to industry data. The National Blockchain Technology Innovation Center is tasked with training over 500,000 blockchain professionals.
The standards track is equally consequential. A Tencent-led proposal became the first United Nations-adopted blockchain standard, according to CSIS analysis. This positions Chinese firms to define interoperability requirements, consensus mechanisms, and data formats that foreign adopters would need to comply with.
The blockchain patent market reached $703 million in 2025 and is projected to approach $950 million in 2026, while global enterprise blockchain spending is projected to exceed $47.96 billion.
Representative Raja Krishnamoorthi warned that China's "methodical push to dominate blockchain's underlying infrastructure could grant the CCP unprecedented influence globally," according to CSIS.
The structural concern is vendor lock-in. CSIS documented a precedent: Tanzania's broadband network, engineered by a Chinese firm, was designed to be "compatible only with Huawei equipment." A similar pattern in blockchain infrastructure — where BSN Spartan becomes the default enterprise chain in Belt and Road partner countries — would give Beijing leverage over data flows, transaction visibility, and system access.
A sovereign chain at national scale puts Beijing in direct competition with the public networks that U.S. and European financial institutions are standardizing on. The architecture is fundamentally different: permissioned vs. permissionless, state-identity-linked vs. pseudonymous, rollback-capable vs. immutable.
According to CSIS, while U.S.-China competition in AI and semiconductors receives substantial policy attention, blockchain infrastructure advancement "has yet to provoke a similar response" — potentially allowing Beijing to "set the de facto rules before other countries fully engage."
The Oct. 9 directive formalizes what has been building since Xi Jinping's 2019 call for China to become a blockchain "rule-maker." Beijing is constructing an integrated stack — from physical compute infrastructure (EDWC) through the permissioned chain layer (BSN) to the settlement instrument (e-CNY) and the cross-border payment rail (mBridge). The architecture is designed for state control: identity-linked, rollback-capable, and exportable to partner economies without any cryptocurrency component.
The economic value captured by this system flows to state-backed operators, Chinese cloud providers, and PBOC-supervised banks — not to decentralized token holders or permissionless validators. For the global blockchain industry, the question is not whether China will build this infrastructure. It already has. The question is whether the permissionless alternative can offer a compelling enough value proposition to prevent BSN Spartan from becoming the default enterprise chain in the 140+ Belt and Road partner countries.