In the grand narrative of today's rapidly evolving global fintech and Web3 landscape, the East and the West are demonstrating fundamentally different underlying logics. While the crypto narrative in the West primarily revolves around public chain performance scaling (such as Layer 2, modular blockchains) and the asset securitization brought by spot ETFs, China is charting a 'hardcore' path centered on national-level digital infrastructure, focusing on the large-scale on-chain integration of the real economy and real-world assets (RWA).
On March 5, 2026, at the first 'Deputies' Passage' session of the Fourth Session of the 14th National People's Congress, Dong Jin, a NPC deputy and President of the Beijing Academy of Blockchain and Edge Computing, disclosed a series of highly impactful industry data and scientific research achievements. The core takeaway is: China has successfully developed the world's first hardware-software integrated blockchain underlying operating system and launched the world's first 96-core blockchain-specific acceleration chip. The advent of this 'China Core' has not only achieved a 50-fold leap in blockchain performance but has also successfully broken through the computational bottlenecks faced by ultra-large-scale blockchain networks.
More crucially, this technology is no longer confined to the laboratory or proof-of-concept stage; it has comprehensively penetrated China's economic operation backbone network—already applied across 16 central ministries and commissions and 27 central enterprises, with over 300,000 cross-border trade enterprises on-chain, trade volume reaching trillions of yuan, and hundreds of billions of invoices circulated on-chain.
For quantitative finance practitioners and underlying technology researchers, this is not merely government affairs news but signifies that the world's largest-scale trusted distributed ledger technology (DLT) network has completed a paradigm shift from 'software-driven' to 'chip-level hardcore-driven'. I will penetrate these macro data points to deeply analyze the underlying logic of this technological breakthrough and its real-world application in trillion-scale finance and trade scenarios.
Before discussing applications, we must clarify a technical pain point: Why does blockchain need a dedicated acceleration chip?
Whether it's Hyperledger Fabric or consortium chain variants based on the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), traditional blockchain system nodes run on general-purpose processors (CPUs, such as x86 or ARM architecture). However, the core mechanisms of blockchain—including asymmetric cryptographic signature verification (e.g., ECDSA, National SM2), hash calculations (e.g., SHA-256, National SM3), frequent network communication for consensus algorithms, and I/O read/write of the state hash tree (State Trie)—are extremely unfriendly to general-purpose CPUs. In ultra-large-scale, high-concurrency scenarios, the computing power of general-purpose CPUs is instantly consumed by massive cryptographic operations, causing the system's throughput (TPS) to hit a ceiling and transaction latency to surge.
The 96-core blockchain-specific acceleration chip developed by the Beijing Academy of Blockchain and Edge Computing team is essentially a 'computing power reconstruction'. In its chip architecture design, it discards the redundant instruction sets of general-purpose computing and is specifically hardware-customized at the ASIC (Application-Specific Integrated Circuit) level for the operational logic of distributed ledgers.
- Hardware Offloading of Cryptographic Primitives: This 96-core chip can strip high-frequency signature verification and hash computations from the main CPU, processing them through highly concurrent hardware pipelines. This allows cryptographic tasks, which originally occupied over 60% of the node's computing resources, to be completed within microseconds.
- Hardware-Software Integrated Operating System: The '3 million lines of source code fully open-sourced' hardware-software integrated operating system mentioned by Deputy Dong Jin (an extension of the 'ChainMaker' ecosystem) means this is not a simple hardware add-on. Instead, the underlying operating system kernel is deeply optimized at the instruction set level for this 96-core chip from the ground up.
- The Financial-Level Significance of the 50-Fold Performance Leap: In the context of traditional consortium chains where TPS typically hovers between a few thousand to ten thousand, a 50-fold performance boost means the network can comfortably handle peak TPS levels of hundreds of thousands or even millions. This crosses the computational threshold required for retail payment systems (like the daily processing volume of Visa, Mastercard) and high-frequency trading清算,彻底 eliminating the risk of宕机 or congestion in the national-level network when facing 'Double Eleven'-level high concurrency data.
Possessing the 'China Core' means that China's construction of a 'trusted digital infrastructure' has achieved autonomy and controllability at the most fundamental physical hardware level,彻底隔绝了潜在的供应链制裁风险和底层硬件后门隐患 (completely isolating potential supply chain sanction risks and underlying hardware backdoor threats).
Let's look at how this 'China Core' penetrates government-enterprise data silos: The 'Trust Foundation' for 16 Ministries and 27 Central Enterprises
The ultimate goal of technological breakthrough is to support complex commercial and social logic. President Dong Jin pointed out that the system has been applied in 16 central ministries and commissions and 27 central enterprises. Behind this data lies a 'unification of the underlying architecture' for China's digital government construction and the digital transformation of central enterprises. In past IT constructions, due to the lack of a trusted data sharing mechanism, deep-rooted 'data silos' formed between various ministries and central enterprises. For example, data from customs, taxation, industry and commerce, and the State Administration of Foreign Exchange were stored in centralized databases, and打通 between them required extremely high trust costs and reconciliation costs.
Relying on the high-performance blockchain network equipped with the 96-core acceleration chip, the national-level government affairs and central enterprise chain network has achieved the following key restructuring: In the applications across the 16 ministries, high-concurrency blockchain combined with privacy computing (such as Multi-Party Computation MPC, Zero-Knowledge Proofs ZKP) achieves 'data availability without visibility'. Various ministries can complete identity verification, credit penetration, and joint risk control without leaking original sensitive data. The high-speed chip ensures that the computationally intensive processes of ZKP generation and verification, which were originally extremely complex, can be completed within milliseconds.
The upstream and downstream industrial chains of the 27 central enterprises are extremely vast, covering core lifelines such as energy, communications, military industry, and infrastructure. In traditional supply chain finance, the credit of core enterprises often only reached first-tier suppliers. Through the high-performance blockchain foundation, the accounts receivable of core enterprises are transformed into on-chain digital vouchers that can be split and circulated. The high throughput ensures that a massive number of N-tier suppliers can complete confirmation of rights and financing in real-time, greatly revitalizing the沉淀资金 (idle capital) of the real economy.
If the ministries and central enterprises are the 'internal circulation' of this infrastructure, then cross-border trade and global payments面向全球 are the 'external circulation' and main battlefield for this digital Great Wall equipped with the 'China Core'. This is the most explosive and finance-focused core area of this technological achievement in its application.
Dong disclosed two astonishing quantitative indicators: over 300,000 cross-border trade enterprises on-chain, with trade volume reaching trillions of yuan; and hundreds of billions of invoices. This marks that China has established the world's largest-scale live application in real-world asset (RWA) tokenization and digital settlement of international trade.
'Hundreds of billions of invoices run on the autonomous blockchain annually'—this is an extremely震撼力的 (shocking) high-concurrency scenario. Invoices are the lifeblood of economic activity. Traditional paper or centralized electronic invoices face systemic risks such as false issuance, duplicate reimbursement, and even using the same invoice for multiple loan frauds at different banks. The generation, circulation, and cancellation of hundreds of billions of invoices pose an extremely stringent test of I/O and consensus for the underlying network. The 50-fold performance boost provided by the 96-core chip means that from the moment an invoice is issued, its hash value and circulation status are broadcast in real-time and锚定 (anchored) on the immutable ledger. For commercial banks, this means the invoice data provided by enterprises possesses absolute authenticity. Banks can据此开发 (develop based on this) fully automated 'instant approval and lending' products, drastically reducing the financing costs for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and the bad debt rate for banks.
Cross-border trade is a typical complex scenario involving multiple parties and a lack of mutual trust. A standard international trade transaction involves more than a dozen parties: exporter, importer, their respective banks, customs, tax authorities, freight forwarders, insurance companies, etc. In the traditional model, key documents like Bills of Lading (B/L) relied mainly on physical mail, Letter of Credit (L/C) reviews were extremely cumbersome, and the capital turnover cycle could take weeks.
Currently, over 300,000 enterprises have accessed this national-level blockchain network, carrying trillions of yuan in trade volume. The application logic is as follows: core logistics and customs clearance data, such as customs declarations, bills of lading, and certificates of origin, are brought on-chain in real-time via oracles. When the on-chain status shows that the goods have been cleared through customs at the destination port and all inspection data is correct, smart contracts deployed on the chain automatically trigger payment instructions. In the past, only large enterprises could bear the high financial friction costs of cross-border trade. Now, highly transparent and real-time on-chain data allows SMEs engaged in exports to obtain pre-shipment financing or order financing based on logistics status提前 (in advance).
面向即将到来的 (Facing the upcoming) '15th Five-Year Plan', the strategic positioning of this technological achievement has far exceeded the pure IT范畴 (domain). Dong Jin used '咬定青山不放松' (clinging to the mountain without relaxation) to describe the determination to tightly围绕 (focus on) the major strategic needs of the country for technological攻坚 (breakthroughs). From lines of open-source code to the 96-core silicon chip, to the汹涌数据 (torrential data) of hundreds of billions of invoices and trillions in cross-border trade, the 'China Core' and hardware-software integrated operating system developed by the Beijing Academy of Blockchain and Edge Computing demonstrate to the world the astonishing industrial爆发力 (explosive force) that blockchain technology can unleash after摒弃 (discarding)单纯的 (mere) token speculation.
For financial practitioners, this means that traditional arbitrage spaces based on information asymmetry will be极度压缩 (severely compressed), while new quantitative models and credit products based on trusted data, smart contract execution, and on-chain asset circulation will迎来 (usher in) a vast blue ocean. The national digital foundation has been laid. A trillion-scale great migration of real-world assets, driven by a leap in computing power, has just begun.
