China’s largest city, Shanghai, officially intends to boost the development of innovations such as blockchain, NFTs, the metaverse, and Web3 in general during its upcoming five-year plan.
On July 13, The Shanghai Municipal Government published the draft of its “14th Five-Year Plan for the Development of the Shanghai Digital Economy”. The document states the mission to “promote the deep integration of digital technology and the real economy”, with “scientists judging technological prospects” and “entrepreneurs discovering market demand”.
The plan suggests supporting companies that plan to build NFT trading platforms and “research and promote the digitization of NFTs and other assets.” A separate section is dedicated to blockchain, with the express commitment to promote the development and application of “blockchain+” technology and build a blockchain development ecosystem with strong innovation ability and independent control.
There is also room for metaverse ambitions, as the municipal government plans to accelerate the research and deployment of the platform for interaction between the virtual world and real society, carrying out the development of basic technologies and encouraging the creation of new platforms. with richer and more diverse content scenarios. The plan highlights the importance of new forms of digital entertainment consumption, such as virtual concerts, virtual idols and virtual sports.
The planned exploration of Web3 opportunities would include cross-platform OpenID research, distributed data storage, a decentralized domain name resolution (DNS) system, and end-to-end encrypted communication technology, complemented by upgrading of the hardware foundation and deployment of 6G, Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6), sixth-generation wireless network technology (Wi-Fi6), and quantum communication.
Although the plan is silent on the prospects for decentralized finance (DeFi), it mentions “digital finance” with the promise of promoting smart contracts and improving trading, payment and settlement, registration and custody of assets. Nevertheless, the section focuses on exploring the pilot of the digital yuan, a central bank digital currency (CBDC), prized by the Bank of China.
Other directions of the five-year plan, not related to cryptocurrencies, touch on the topics of smart cities, low-carbon energy, digital health and smart service robots, among others.
In his article on June 26, Yifan He, CEO of Red Date Technology – a major technology company involved in the development of China’s leading blockchain project, the Blockchain Services Network (BSN) – has called private cryptocurrencies as the “greatest Ponzi scheme in the history of mankind”.
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