But Xi’s ambition had and continues to have an inherent contradiction. While blockchain technology is admired by the Chinese, its most popular application, cryptocurrencies, is now illegal. In the past decade, China has banned crypto transactions (2013), initial coin offerings (2017), crypto mining (incrementally from 2019-2021) and – the final blow – cryptocurrency trading, in 2021. As a result, the very idea of blockchain is different in China than anywhere else in the world.
