As per a report titled “2020 Blockchain Industry Development”, firms in China have submitted 4,435 applications for patents related to blockchain, after the country’s president Xi Jinping gave a thumps up to the blockchain domain.
The survey was conducted jointly by Tsinghua University, Peking University, and China Institute of Communications.
Last October, during a committee session, President Xi advocated expedited adoption of blockchain technologies as he considered it as a key for innovation.
As per the study, e-commerce behemoth Alibaba Group submitted 200 blockchain related patent applications and topped the list of companies which had filed blockchain patents.
That is ten times the number of patent applications filed by IBM over the same period.
Top multinational firms have also demonstrated great deal of interest in filing blockchain patents from China. Almost 35 multinationals, including Walmart, Microsoft, Sony, Mastercard and Intel had submitted an agreegate of 212 blockchain patents as of March 2020.
Two years back, the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), stated that a majority of patent filings related to blockchain technology was from China.
Similarly, data obtained by Thomson Reuters from the global patent organization indicated that more than 50% of 406 patents filed three years back was from China.
The country led the blockchain filing list with 225 blockchain patents, followed by the US with 91 and Australia with 13. Blockchain patent filing increased considerably in China after Xi Jinping’s 2019 praise of the technology.