Blockchain development status and trends

Globally, at the industry scale level, there are 2,450 blockchain companies worldwide as of August 2019, after experiencing the peak number of blockchain companies established in 2014 and 2017, since 2018. The number of blockchain enterprises in the United States, China and the United Kingdom ranked the top three respectively; the number of blockchain enterprises in Canada, Singapore and Switzerland is also high. On the one hand, developed countries have carried out research and application of blockchain at the strategic level. The United States, the United Kingdom, Russia, Australia, Japan and other countries have designed national blockchain strategies and roadmaps to promote the development of blockchain industry. On the other hand, multinational corporate giants have laid out the technology development and application of blockchain. Foreign Internet giants such as Google, Microsoft, Oracle and IBM have laid out their research on blockchain technology and launched technical solutions and applications. The global blockchain application ecology covers all aspects of economy and society. After accumulation in recent years, global blockchain has seen explosive development, and blockchain has carried out a series of applications in financial services, supply chain management, culture and entertainment, intelligent manufacturing, social welfare, medical health and other fields.

In the future, the blockchain application industry will develop from single scene application to cross-industry scene application, and the integration of blockchain with Internet of Things, big data and artificial intelligence will become a trend, and blockchain will gradually penetrate from financial industry to diversified fields such as Internet of Things and medical health. Although at this stage, the development of blockchain industry and application faces challenges such as short time of technology emergence, small scale of industry, application mostly in the exploration stage, difficulty of blockchain regulation and existence of cognitive gap. However, it is possible to strengthen top-level design in strategy formulation, pay attention to basic theory and technology research, pay attention to independent and controllable technology and product development, and accelerate the development of standards and norms. In terms of tactical development, we should focus on the deep integration of blockchain with technologies such as "cloud computing, big data, Internet of Things, mobile Internet and smart city", the deep integration with information construction and the deep integration with existing IT enterprises.