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

In the grand narrative of the accelerated evolution of global fintech and Web3, the East and West are exhibiting drastically different underlying logics. While the Western crypto narrative mainly revolves around the performance scaling of public chains (such as Layer 2 and modular blockchains) and asset securitization brought about by spot ETFs, China is forging a "hardcore" path centered on national-level digital infrastructure and focusing on the large-scale on-chaining of real-world assets (RWAs) in the real economy.

On March 5, 2026, at the first "Representatives' Corridor" session of the Fourth Session of the 14th National People's Congress, Dong Jin, a National People's Congress representative and president of the Beijing Microchip Blockchain and Edge Computing Research Institute, disclosed a series of data and research achievements that were highly impactful to the industry. The core point is that China has successfully developed the world's first integrated hardware and software blockchain operating system and launched the world's first 96-core dedicated blockchain acceleration chip. The advent of this "Chinese chip" not only enabled a 50-fold leap in blockchain performance but also successfully broke through the computing power bottleneck faced by ultra-large-scale blockchain networks.

More importantly, this technology is no longer confined to the laboratory or proof-of-concept stage, but has been fully integrated into the backbone network of my country's economic operation—it has been applied to 16 central ministries and 27 central enterprises, with more than 300,000 enterprises involved in cross-border trade on the chain, the trade amount reaching trillions of yuan, and tens of billions of invoices circulating on the chain.

For quantitative finance practitioners and researchers of underlying technologies, this is not merely political news, but a significant milestone marking the completion of the paradigm shift from "software-driven" to "chip-level hard-core driven" for the world's largest trusted distributed ledger (DLT) network. I will delve into these macro-level data to deeply analyze the underlying logic of this technological breakthrough and its real-world applications in trillion-dollar financial and trade scenarios.

Before discussing applications, we must clarify a key technical challenge: why does blockchain require dedicated acceleration chips?

Whether it's Hyperledger Fabric or consortium blockchain variants based on the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), nodes in traditional blockchain systems run on general-purpose processors (CPUs, such as x86 or ARM architectures). However, the core mechanisms of blockchain—including asymmetric cryptographic signature verification (such as ECDSA, SM2), hash calculations (such as SHA-256, SM3), frequent network communication for consensus algorithms, and I/O read/write operations for the 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 system throughput (TPS) to hit its limit and transaction latency to surge.

The 96-core blockchain-specific acceleration chip developed by the Beijing Microchip team is essentially a "computing power reconstruction." In terms of chip architecture design, it abandons the redundant instruction set of general-purpose computing and performs ASIC (Application-Specific Integrated Circuit) level hardware customization specifically for the operation logic of distributed ledgers.

• Hardware offloading of cryptographic primitives: This 96-core chip offloads high-frequency signature verification and hash operations from the main CPU, processing them through a high-concurrency hardware pipeline. This allows cryptographic tasks that previously consumed over 60% of a node's computing resources to be completed within microseconds.
• The integrated hardware and software operating system mentioned by Representative Dong Jin, which has "3 million lines of source code all open source" (i.e., an extension of the "Chang'an Chain" ecosystem), means that this is not a simple hardware plug-in, but rather a deep optimization of the 96-core chip at the instruction set level, starting from the underlying kernel of the operating system.
• The financial-grade significance of a 50x performance leap: While traditional consortium blockchains typically hover around several thousand to ten thousand TPS, a 50x performance increase means the network can easily handle peak TPS of hundreds of thousands or even millions. This surpasses the computing power requirements of retail payment systems (such as Visa and Mastercard's daily processing volume) and high-frequency transaction clearing, completely eliminating the risk of downtime or congestion for national-level networks when facing high-concurrency data like during "Double Eleven" shopping festivals.

Having "Chinese chips" means that my country's "trustworthy digital infrastructure" has achieved independent control over the most basic physical hardware, completely isolating it from potential supply chain sanctions and backdoor vulnerabilities in the underlying hardware.

Let's examine how this "Chinese chip" penetrates the data silos between government and enterprises: a "trust foundation" connecting 16 ministries and 27 central state-owned enterprises.

The ultimate goal of technological breakthroughs is to support complex business and social logic. Dean Dong Jin pointed out that the system has been applied to 16 central ministries and 27 central enterprises. Behind this data lies a "unified underlying architecture" for my country's digital government construction and the digital transformation of central enterprises. In past IT development, due to the lack of a reliable data sharing mechanism, deeply entrenched "data silos" formed between 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 connecting them required extremely high trust and reconciliation costs.

Leveraging a high-performance blockchain network equipped with a 96-core accelerator chip, the national-level government and central enterprise blockchain network has achieved the following key restructuring: In applications across 16 ministries, high-concurrency blockchain combined with privacy computing (such as Multi-Party Computation (MPC) and Zero-Knowledge Proof (ZKP)) has achieved "data usable but invisible." Ministries can complete identity verification, credit penetration, and joint risk control without disclosing original sensitive data. The high-speed chip ensures that the originally extremely complex ZKP generation and verification process can be completed within milliseconds.

The 27 central enterprises have extremely large upstream and downstream industrial chains, covering core sectors such as energy, telecommunications, military industry, and infrastructure. In traditional supply chain finance, the credit of core enterprises can often only be transmitted to first-tier suppliers. Through a high-performance blockchain platform, the accounts receivable of core enterprises are transformed into on-chain, divisible, and transferable digital vouchers. High throughput ensures that a massive number of N-tier suppliers can complete the confirmation of rights and financing in real time, greatly revitalizing the idle funds in the real economy.

If ministries and state-owned enterprises constitute the "internal circulation" of this infrastructure, then cross-border trade and global payments represent the "external circulation" and main battleground of this digital Great Wall powered by "Chinese chips." This is the core area where the application of this technological achievement has the greatest potential and has attracted the most attention from the financial sector.

Dong Jin revealed two astonishing quantitative indicators: over 300,000 enterprises involved in cross-border trade have joined the blockchain, with a trade volume reaching trillions of yuan; and tens of billions of invoices have been issued. This signifies that my country has established the world's largest-scale real-world asset (RWA) and international trade digital settlement application.

"Tens of billions of invoices run on the autonomous blockchain every year"—this is a truly impressive high-concurrency scenario. Invoices are the lifeblood of economic activity, and traditional paper or centralized electronic invoices face systemic risks such as fraudulent issuance, duplicate reimbursements, and even the use of the same invoice to obtain multiple loans from different banks. The generation, circulation, and cancellation of tens of billions of invoices pose an extremely demanding I/O and consensus test to the underlying network. The 50-fold performance leap provided by the 96-core chip ensures that the hash value and circulation status of each invoice are broadcast in real time and anchored to an immutable ledger from the moment it is issued. For commercial banks, this means that the invoice data provided by enterprises has absolute authenticity, allowing banks to develop fully automated "instant approval and instant loan" products, greatly reducing the financing costs for SMEs and the bad debt rate for banks.

Cross-border trade is a complex scenario characterized by multi-party competition and a lack of mutual trust. A standard international trade transaction involves more than a dozen nodes, including exporters, importers, banks on both sides, customs, tax authorities, freight forwarders, and insurance companies. In the traditional model, key documents such as bills of lading (B/L) mainly rely on paper mailings, and the review of letters of credit (L/C) is extremely cumbersome, with a capital turnover cycle of several weeks.

Currently, over 300,000 enterprises have connected to this national-level blockchain network, handling trillions of yuan in trade. Its application logic lies in the real-time uploading of core logistics and customs clearance data, such as customs declarations, bills of lading, and certificates of origin, to the blockchain via oracles. Once the on-chain status indicates that the goods have cleared customs at the destination port and all inspection data are correct, the smart contract deployed on the chain automatically triggers a payment instruction. Previously, only large enterprises could bear the high financial costs of cross-border trade. Now, highly transparent and real-time on-chain data allows small and medium-sized export enterprises to obtain pre-shipment financing or order financing in advance based on logistics status.

With the upcoming 15th Five-Year Plan in mind, the strategic positioning of this technological achievement has far exceeded the pure IT realm. Dong Jin used the phrase "holding fast to the green hills and never letting go" to describe the determination to tackle technological challenges closely aligned with the country's major strategic needs. From lines of open-source code to 96-core silicon-based chips, and then to the surging data of hundreds of billions of invoices and trillions of dollars in cross-border trade, Beijing Microchip's "Chinese chip" and integrated hardware and software operating system have demonstrated to the world the astonishing industrial explosive power that blockchain technology can unleash after abandoning mere token speculation.

For financial professionals, this means that traditional arbitrage opportunities based on information asymmetry will be drastically compressed, while new quantitative models and credit products based on trusted data, smart contract execution, and on-chain asset transfer will usher in a vast blue ocean. The nation's digital infrastructure has been built, and a trillion-dollar real-world asset migration driven by a leap in computing power has only just begun.