Is China banking on Blockchain-powered gaming business?

Despite PBoC’s ban on cryptocurrencies in last January, they emphasize on their intentions to increase its research and development into cryptocurrencies. China revolved innovation in the space blockchain and cryptocurrency space, the country has shown keen interest in these domains. Chinese companies have applied for over 550 patents on blockchain technology over the last decade which has surpassed the number of applications from the countries like the U.S. and South Korea.

With China’s Communist Party having recently published a book on the future applications and challenges of blockchain technology, and with more gamers in China than the United States’ population, the question to be clarified which seems quite dubious is that - could gaming prove to be the industry that drives the adoption of blockchain in the country — and in the region?

While recent news around the slowdown of the Chinese gaming industry and the halt in the government’s approval of gaming licenses may compel some to believe otherwise.

With a largely untapped crypto gaming market in Asia, and with gamers continuously purchasing items in games in a new digital economy known as micro-transactions, David Hanson, the Co-CEO of blockchain-powered gaming distribution platform Ultra, who is based in Shanghai, is happy to elaborate on how blockchain offers gamers the ownership of virtual goods, without fear of accounts being banned or virtual items being reclaimed by developers.

While Chinese president Xi Jinping has officially endorsed blockchain as a technology that will “deeply affect fate of the country,” despite Beijing banned cryptocurrency trading and ICOs in the recent past, and then went on to crack down on bitcoin mining early this year.

Well, as per Forbes, in China, about 41% of their start-ups who managed to fetch funding in the Q1’2017 were blockchain related. Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shanxi, Henan, Guiyang and Hangzhou all have policies actively attracting and encouraging blockchain-based projects, with Hangzhou pledging investments of $1.5 billion (10 billion yuan) in the technology.

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