China wants its national blockchain network “basically built” by 2030. The target sits in the National Informatization 15th Five-Year Plan, issued by the Central Cyberspace Affairs Commission, the Communist Party body that steers internet and digital policy, and published on Friday 23 October at 10:00 UTC (18:00 in Beijing). The 14-page document covers 2026 to 2030 and puts the blockchain goal in the same sentence as 6G, a fully built next-generation communication network and an integrated land, sea, air and space network.
Crypto gets nothing from it. In February, eight Chinese agencies led by the People’s Bank of China replaced the 2021 crypto ban with a stricter notice that treats every crypto-related business on the mainland as illegal financial activity. The new plan leaves that untouched.
The goal itself is not new either. What Friday’s plan adds is a deadline, plus a rough outline of what should be built and where the technology should be used first.
What the plan actually says about the national blockchain network
Coindaro read the full text of the plan as well as the summary on the Cyberspace Administration’s website. The summary mentions blockchain once, in the 2030 targets. The full document mentions it ten times.
The main instruction comes in the chapter on new information infrastructure. It tells authorities to “implement the national blockchain network construction project and lay the foundation of the internet of value” (Coindaro’s translation). The same paragraph orders a national integrated computing power network, and asks for computing power, electricity and networks to be developed together. In Beijing’s planning, the blockchain sits with computing centres and the power grid, not with finance.
A box listing the infrastructure projects gives the only details on how the network is meant to look. It asks authorities to speed up completion of a central backbone network and to get regional hubs running as one connected network. It wants shared basic services such as distributed digital identity improved. And it names the first uses: wider digitalisation of shipping and freight trade, and “major application scenarios” in development and reform, the low-carbon transition, government services and taxation.
Four regions get their own blockchain line in a separate box on regional coordination:
- Beijing, Tianjin and Hebei are to use it for a “dual airport hub” and for smart logistics.
- The Yangtze River Delta is to deepen its use in trade and finance.
- The Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area is told to speed up new blockchain applications, in the same item that calls for orderly cross-border data flows.
- The Chengdu-Chongqing area is to deploy it at scale in commerce and distribution, manufacturing and agriculture.
The other mentions are short. Blockchain is one of the fields, with chips, displays and artificial intelligence, where China wants technology products “with international leading power”. It is cited with privacy-preserving computation as a tool for trading data more safely. And the plan asks for a fuller set of technical standards for it.
What the plan leaves out
No operator is named. There is no budget, no technical architecture, no interim date before 2030 and no number to measure progress: the plan’s table of twelve main indicators has none for blockchain. The words “virtual currency”, “crypto” and “stablecoin” do not appear anywhere in the text.
The digital yuan does appear, once, in a passage on services and digital consumption: the plan says China will “steadily develop the digital renminbi”. That line is not tied to the blockchain network in any way, and Coindaro found nothing in the document that links the two.
For comparison, here are some of the indicators the plan does set for 2030, against their 2025 level:
| Indicator | 2025 | 2030 target |
|---|---|---|
| Internet penetration rate | 80.1% | 85% |
| 5G (including 5G-A) base stations per 10,000 people | 34 | 50 |
| IPv6 share of network traffic | 33.79% | 42% |
| Power usage effectiveness of new large and very large computing facilities | 1.25 | below 1.2 |
| Core digital economy industries, share of GDP | 10.5% (2024) | 12.5% |
| Cross-border e-commerce imports and exports | 2.84 trillion yuan | 3.5 trillion yuan |
All twelve indicators are listed as “expected” targets, the softer of the two kinds China uses in its plans, not binding ones.
Second time in two weeks, third time this year
On 9 October, the Party’s Central Committee and the State Council published their Opinions on Developing New Quality Productive Forces, a policy paper with 19 measures. Measure (9), on merging the real economy with the digital economy, lists projects such as “East Data, West Computing” and the industrial internet, then calls for building “a national integrated computing power network and a national blockchain network” (Coindaro’s translation). That is one clause, with no date attached.
Before that, the national 15th Five-Year Plan outline, approved by the National People’s Congress on 12 March and released in full by Xinhua the next day, already included a national blockchain network project, according to Cointelegraph. Coindaro could not check the outline’s exact wording. The informatization plan itself says it was drawn up on the basis of that outline.
The top-level plan named the project in March. The Party and the government put it on their list of priorities in October. Now the commission in charge of digital policy has given it a 2030 date. Detailed rules from ministries or provinces would be the next step, and none has been announced.
The direction goes back further. On 24 October 2019, President Xi Jinping told a Politburo study session that China should treat blockchain as a breakthrough for its own core technology, CoinDesk reported at the time. In June 2021, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and the Cyberspace Administration issued guidelines that aimed to make China a leader in blockchain technology by 2025, The Block reported.
For newcomers: a network like this one is a permissioned ledger run by approved operators, a very different thing from Bitcoin’s open network. Our guide to public, private and consortium blockchains explains the difference, and what a blockchain is covers the basics.
Why a state blockchain does not mean China is opening to crypto
Beijing has kept the two apart for years, and 2026 made the line sharper. On 6 February, the People’s Bank of China and seven other agencies, among them the securities regulator, the financial regulator and the Ministry of Public Security, issued a new notice on virtual currency risks (Yinfa [2026] No. 42). It took effect on publication and repealed the ten-agency notice of September 2021 (Yinfa [2021] No. 237) that had banned crypto trading.
The agencies say they agreed the text with the Office of the Central Cyberspace Affairs Commission, the body behind Friday’s plan, as well as with the Supreme People’s Court and the Supreme People’s Procuratorate, and that the State Council approved it. The same commission is building a state blockchain and signing off on the crypto ban.
The new notice keeps the substance of the old ban and adds to it. It says bitcoin, ether and tether have no legal tender status, and that “virtual currency-related business activities are illegal financial activities” (Coindaro’s translation). Exchanging yuan for crypto, trading between tokens, acting as a counterparty, providing pricing or information services and raising money through tokens are all “strictly prohibited”. Offshore firms may not serve mainland users, and company names may no longer contain terms such as “virtual currency”, “stablecoin” or “RWA”.
Two additions matter for readers following stablecoins and tokenization. No one, at home or abroad, may issue a yuan-pegged stablecoin offshore without approval from the relevant authorities, and mainland companies and the offshore entities they control may not issue crypto abroad without approval. And tokenizing real-world assets on the mainland is banned, except for activities on “specific financial infrastructure” approved by the regulators in charge. The notice also keeps the crackdown on mining.
Nothing in Friday’s plan softens any of this. Cointelegraph’s report on the plan says the same: mainland China bans crypto-related business while promoting blockchain as a national priority.
Europe has taken the opposite route. In the European Union, crypto firms can get a licence under the MiCA regulation; in mainland China, the same business is an offence.
What to watch before 2030
The open questions are practical. Who will run the central backbone, and how will the regional hubs connect? The plan gives no budget, and it does not say whether private companies will be able to use the distributed digital identity services. The plan says the Cyberspace Administration will monitor how it is carried out and publish regular reports on national informatization, which should give the first public measure of progress.
Watch also whether the “specific financial infrastructure” allowed for tokenized assets in the February notice ends up running on the national network. Today, no document says so.