From integrated hardware and software to a trillion-dollar ecosystem: A look into the "Chinese core" of national-level blockchain infrastructure

In the grand narrative of today’s global fintech and Web3 acceleration, the East and West are demonstrating fundamentally different underlying logics. Western crypto narratives mainly focus on scalability of public blockchains (such as Layer 2 solutions, modular blockchains) and asset securitization through spot ETFs. Meanwhile, China is forging a “hardcore” path centered on national-level digital infrastructure, emphasizing large-scale on-chain integration of real economy and real-world assets (RWA).

On March 5, 2026, during the first “Representative Channel” session of the 14th National People’s Congress, Deputy Dong Jin, director of Beijing Microchip Blockchain and Edge Computing Research Institute, disclosed a series of industry-shocking data and scientific achievements. The core point is: China has successfully developed the world’s first integrated hardware-software blockchain operating system and launched the world’s first 96-core blockchain-specific acceleration chip. The advent of this “Chinese chip” has not only boosted blockchain performance by 50 times but also successfully broke through the computational bottleneck faced by ultra-large-scale blockchain networks.

More critically, this technology is no longer confined to labs or proof-of-concept stages but has fully penetrated China’s economic backbone networks—applied to 16 central ministries and 27 central enterprises, with over 300,000 cross-border trade on-chain companies, totaling trillions of yuan in trade volume, and hundreds of billions of on-chain invoices in circulation.

For quantitative finance practitioners and underlying technology researchers, this is not just government news but marks the paradigm shift of the world’s largest trusted distributed ledger (DLT) network from “software-driven” to “chip-level hardcore-driven.” I will analyze these macro data points to deeply interpret the underlying logic of this technological breakthrough and its real-world applications in trillion-yuan financial and trade scenarios.

Before exploring applications, we must clarify a technical pain point: why does blockchain need dedicated acceleration chips?

Whether it’s Hyperledger Fabric or Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM)-based consortium chains, nodes in traditional blockchain systems run on general-purpose processors (CPUs, such as x86 or ARM architectures). However, core blockchain mechanisms—including asymmetric cryptographic signature verification (like ECDSA, SM2), hash computations (SHA-256, SM3), consensus algorithm network communication, and state hash tree (State Trie) I/O operations—are highly unfriendly to general CPUs. In ultra-large-scale, high-concurrency scenarios, the massive cryptographic computations can instantly consume the CPU’s computing power, causing throughput (TPS) to hit ceilings and transaction latency to spike.

The 96-core blockchain acceleration chip developed by Beijing Microchip fundamentally represents a “computing power reconstruction.” Its architecture abandons redundant instruction sets of general-purpose computing, instead performing ASIC-level hardware customization tailored specifically to the logic of distributed ledgers.

Hardware offloading of cryptographic primitives: This 96-core chip can offload high-frequency signature verification and hash operations from the main CPU, processing them through high-concurrency hardware pipelines. Tasks that previously occupied over 60% of node computing resources can now be completed within microseconds.

Integrated hardware-software operating system: The “300 million lines of source code fully open-sourced” integrated OS (an extension of the “Chang’an Chain” ecosystem), means this is not just a hardware add-on but a deeply optimized instruction set-level system from the kernel upward, specifically designed for this 96-core chip.

50x performance leap with financial-grade significance: In traditional consortium chains where TPS usually hovers in the thousands to ten-thousands, a 50-fold performance increase means the network can comfortably handle peak TPS of hundreds of thousands or even over a million. This surpasses the computational thresholds needed for retail payment systems (like Visa, Mastercard daily throughput) and high-frequency trading clearing, eliminating the risk of outages or congestion during “Double 11” level high concurrency.

Owning a “Chinese chip” signifies that China’s construction of “trusted digital infrastructure” is autonomous and controllable at the hardware level, completely isolating potential supply chain sanctions and hardware backdoors.

Let’s examine how this “Chinese chip” penetrates government and enterprise data silos: the “trust foundation” of 16 ministries and 27 central enterprises.

The ultimate goal of this technological breakthrough is to support complex business and social logic. Dong Jin pointed out that the system has been applied in 16 central ministries and 27 central enterprises. Behind this data is a “bottom-layer architecture unification” for China’s digital government and enterprise digital transformation. Past IT infrastructure lacked a trusted data-sharing mechanism, resulting in deeply ingrained “data silos” among ministries and enterprises. For example, customs, tax, industry and commerce, foreign exchange bureaus each store data in centralized databases, making interconnection costly in trust and reconciliation.

Leveraging the high-performance blockchain network equipped with 96-core acceleration chips, the national-level government and enterprise chain networks have undergone key restructuring: in applications across 16 ministries, high-concurrency blockchain combined with privacy-preserving techniques (such as Multi-Party Computation MPC, Zero-Knowledge Proofs ZKP) enables “data to be available but not visible.” Ministries can perform identity verification, credit penetration, and joint risk control without revealing sensitive raw data. The high-performance chips ensure that the computationally intensive ZKP generation and verification can be completed within milliseconds.

The upstream and downstream supply chains of 27 central enterprises are vast, covering energy, communications, military industry, infrastructure, and other core sectors. In traditional supply chain finance, core enterprise credit is often only transmitted to first-tier suppliers. With the high-throughput blockchain base, accounts receivable of core enterprises are transformed into on-chain divisible and transferable digital vouchers. The high throughput ensures that numerous tier-N suppliers can perform real-time rights confirmation and financing, greatly activating the capital reserves of the real economy.

If ministries and central enterprises are the “internal cycle” of this infrastructure, then global cross-border trade and international payments are the “external cycle” and main battlefield of this China-chipped digital Great Wall. This is where the technological achievement demonstrates explosive application potential and attracts the most attention from the financial sector.

Dong Jin revealed two astonishing quantitative indicators: over 300,000 cross-border trade companies on-chain, with a trade volume reaching trillions of yuan; and hundreds of billions of invoices generated. This marks China’s establishment of the world’s largest real-world asset (RWA) and international trade digital settlement application.

“Billions of invoices processed annually on autonomous blockchain” is a highly impressive high-concurrency scenario. Invoices are the lifeblood of economic activity. Traditional paper or centralized electronic invoices face systemic risks like false issuance, duplicate reimbursement, and even fraud using the same invoice across multiple banks. Generating, transferring, and canceling hundreds of billions of invoices puts extreme demands on the underlying network’s I/O and consensus. The 96-core chip’s 50x performance boost ensures that from the moment an invoice is issued, its hash and transfer status are broadcast and anchored on an immutable ledger in real time. For commercial banks, this means that enterprise invoice data is absolutely authentic, enabling the development of fully automated “instant approval and instant loans” products, significantly reducing financing costs for SMEs and bad debt rates for banks.

Cross-border trade is a typical multi-party, trust-deficient complex scenario. A standard international trade involves exporters, importers, banks, customs, tax authorities, freight forwarders, insurers, and more—over a dozen nodes. Traditionally, key documents like bills of lading (B/L) rely on paper mailing, and letter of credit (L/C) review is cumbersome, with funds transfer taking weeks.

Currently, over 300,000 enterprises are connected to this national blockchain network, supporting trillions of yuan in trade volume. The application logic involves: customs declarations, bills of lading, certificates of origin, and other logistics and clearance data being uploaded via oracles in real time. When on-chain status confirms that goods have cleared customs at the destination port and all inspection data are verified, deployed smart contracts automatically trigger payment instructions. Previously, only large enterprises could bear the high financial friction costs of cross-border trade. Now, transparent, real-time on-chain data allows small and micro exporters to obtain pre-shipment financing or order financing based on logistics status.

Looking ahead to China’s “14th Five-Year Plan,” this technological achievement’s strategic positioning far exceeds pure IT scope. Dong Jin described it as “clinging to the green mountain”—a determination to focus on major national strategic needs through technological breakthroughs. From open-source code lines to 96-core silicon chips, and from hundreds of billions of invoices to trillions in cross-border trade data, Beijing Microchip’s “Chinese chip” and integrated OS demonstrate the industry’s explosive potential once blockchain moves beyond mere token speculation.

For financial practitioners, this means the traditional arbitrage space based on information asymmetry will be greatly compressed. New quant models and credit products based on trusted data, smart contract execution, and on-chain asset circulation will open vast blue oceans. The national digital infrastructure has been built, and a trillion-yuan real-world asset migration driven by computing power leap is just beginning.