Chinese city Nanjing launches $1.5 billion blockchain fund

Nanjing City, capital of the Jiangsu province in China, has kick-started a blockchain investment fund of 10 billion yuan to help nurture the alt-coin economy and the public blockchain projects in China.

In a partnership with Zhongguancun Blockchain Industry Alliance, a conglomerate of governmental research institutes and blockchain companies, Nanjing City made the announcement of the $1.48 billion fund and the very first Industrial Public Chain Summit (IPCS). The summit was attended by several high-ranking local government officials, including the deputy secretary of the Nanjing wing of the Communist Party of China Luo Qun.

Although initially adverse toward all crypto technologies and having shut down cryptocurrency trading locally, the stance of the Chinese government towards alt-coins has softened since the beginning of the year. In a meeting in May with local scientists and engineers, President Xi Jinping maintained that the blockchain was indeed a breakthrough technology. This comment has been widely regarded as an endorsement.

Among the first organisations to benefit from the fund will be the UDAP Foundation and the TokenX Community. This move aims to have crypto technologies used in a wider range of fields such as cross-border platforms, healthcare, energy, and environmental protection.

Industries that adopt blockchain technologies will be able to provide innumerable more chains leading to more and more technological breakthroughs, according to the chairman of the Zhongguancun Blockchain Industry Alliance.

Nanjing shall also enable blockchain companies to shift their bases of operations to the city, as they mentioned at the summit. Deputy chairman of Tsinghua University’s Internet Industry Research Center, Wang Xiaohui explained that the most important elements that would ensure the token economy’s success would simply be global cooperation, industrial convergence, consensus, and autonomy.

The chairman of South Korea’s government-endorsed institute of financial research Global Finance Society, Oh Kap-soo was also present at the summit. He has said in a statement that it can truly have wide applications in education, science, and finance, and if the two countries should work together, the process of technological development in the field could definitely be sped up.

Currently, China is the world leader in the most number of Blockchain patents filings, whereas South Korea has the most thriving cryptocurrency network in the world.