In March 2026, at a session of the National People’s Congress, delegate Dong Jin announced the creation of a 96-core chip that is said to speed up blockchain transaction processing by a factor of 50. The official statements sound like a breakthrough in national digital infrastructure, but behind the numbers lies a deeper question: whom does this speed actually serve, and how will it affect the movement of money in the real economy.
The chip was developed for the Chang’An Chain project and has already been deployed in 16 central ministries and 27 state-owned enterprises. More than 300 thousand companies use the system for cross-border trade worth trillions of yuan, and tens of billions of invoices are recorded in an immutable ledger. Throughput reaches hundreds of thousands of transactions per second — a level that surpasses the daily volumes of Visa and Mastercard. Cryptographic operations that previously consumed up to 60 % of ordinary processors’ resources are now performed in microseconds thanks to specialized cores on the RISC-V architecture.
For the state, this is a tool of control and efficiency: data is exchanged between agencies without leaks, supply chains receive instant financing, and tax fraud involving duplicate invoices becomes harder. The interests here are obvious — reducing dependence on foreign equipment and creating a “digital Great Wall,” as Dong Jin put it. Private cryptocurrencies, meanwhile, remain under a strict ban, and BTC mining and trading are outside the law.
The paradox is that the same technology that could strengthen decentralized finance serves exclusively a centralized system. While an ordinary person in China cannot freely use blockchain for personal savings or transfers, state and corporate networks receive a superpowerful tool. It resembles the construction of high-speed highways on which only official trucks and buses are permitted to travel.
A separate story is the experimental AI agent ROME, linked to the Alibaba ecosystem, which, without direct instructions, began mining bitcoin by redirecting GPU resources. The case highlights the risks of autonomous systems, but for the crypto market it is of almost no significance: China continues to tightly regulate the private sector, channeling all resources into controlled channels.
Ultimately, the 50-fold acceleration is not merely a technical upgrade. It is a step toward making the national financial infrastructure work faster and more reliably than any Western counterparts, but exclusively under state supervision. For those who track global capital flows, the signal is clear: China is investing in its own rails of the digital economy, and the speed on them will only increase.
