Algorand goes to China
China’s state-backed Blockchain-based Service Network (BSN) International officially launched the Open Public Blockchain (OPB) Initiative in the last week of September and inducted Algorand as one of the first major blockchains to join the initiative — an awesome news for the Algorand ecosystem and community. Post that Algorand has launched both its mainnet and testnet on the BSN portal. I thought it would be a good time to take a closer look at what this association can bring about for both BSN and Algorand.
BSN’s Open Blockchain Initiative
BSN, a global infrastructure based on the blockchain operating environment, providing a one-stop-shop for dApp developers to deploy and manage any permissioned or permissionless blockchain applications, is cross-cloud, cross-portal, and cross-framework global public infrastructure network. BSN’s OPB initiative is a part of the Chinese government’s Global Blockchain Strategy (explained below). The aim of this project is to greatly reduce participants’ costs and motivate micro-size companies and experts to access BSN and accelerate the usage of blockchain. The project relies on public city nodes provided by chosen data centers and cloud resources providers to be linked to the BSN network. Till now there has been a deployment of over 130 public city nodes in the BSN network, covering all provinces and major cities in China as well as a few international nodes.
With its inception in 2019, BSN was launched in April 2020 as a collaborative project between the Chinese governments and multiple enterprises to support blockchain development without any additional requirement of extra physical servers or cloud services. It was made available to external users in August 2020 which was followed by induction of different public blockchains to the Open Blockchain Initiative.
What’s the advantage for BSN and by extension China?
China, with BSN as part of its Global Blockchain Strategy vision to be the leading jurisdiction for blockchain technology, by providing the infrastructure for promising blockchain projects to develop further at the same time allowing them to work in a connected way within the same technological environment is taking steps in the right direction to fulfill its vision.
This project will not only attract public blockchains but will also (and already has) attracted international companies operating in the blockchain space thereby resulting in not only revenues but also making it a hub for blockchain innovation. With access to a global developer community, ideas and projects, BSN International can help accelerate technical and business innovation among developers, resolve the high cost associated with dApp deployment and maintenance and potentially attract more developers to come and build on high-quality projects such as Algorand.
What’s in it for Algorand?
Working to make its mission statement of building a Borderless Economy, Algorand is (and has been) committed to the development of an inclusive and transparent system that transcend boundaries where anyone can build decentralized applications and projects. Participating in the BSN International provides a cost effective and stable infrastructure for Algorand and by extension to the developers and enterprises building on Algorand to a previously restricted jurisdiction as well as paving ways to achieve its vision of wide-scale blockchain development and adoption. By connecting Algorand’s development environment to BSN nodes, Algorand developers will be able to build dApps through BSN overseas PCNs and run nodes, as well as access the enterprise chain and financial data.
What to look out for?
Due to legal and regulatory requirements in China, public blockchain projects have found it difficult to enter the Chinese market. The Open Public Blockchain Initiative serves as a solution to enable the public chains to develop within the borders of China, in a regulatory-compliant manner and under surveillance, while providing a low-cost and easy-to-use blockchain infrastructure for Chinese developers and enterprises alike but with certain norms to be followed as stated by BSN. This will include allowing only designated operators to build and operate nodes, where dApps verify on-chain transactions and store data. The network will block all peer-to-peer fee transactions and require its users to use local currencies (token) instead of token to cover gas fees for building and running DApps on chain.
Concluding Insights
The Chinese government is an active supporter of blockchain technology — but only on its own terms which is understandable. The Open Public Blockchain Initiative is a step in the right direction to open up the Chinese market for blockchain development. Learning to develop on Algorand will enable the Chinese developer community to build for both national and international markets, using the same skill set.
This is a step in the right direction for Algorand which is focused on enabling all developers to build next generation tools, educating and fostering an inclusive community encompassing protocol governance and economic efficiency in the development of the Algorand ecosystem. This integration is a big win for Algorand, as it will help expand and stimulate the already vibrant community of Algorand.
