China looks to become blockchain world leader with Xi Jinping backing

China is poised to take the lead in blockchain after it was given strong backing by the country’s leader President Xi Jinping, experts told CNBC. The move could allow the world’s second-largest economy to control the development of the nascent technology in the absence of competition from other regions like Europe and the U.S.

Blockchain refers to a technology which began with the cryptocurrency bitcoin. In that case, its role was an immutable and tamper-proof public ledger of activity. It was also “decentralized,” which means it was not owned by any one party.

The definition of the technology has since evolved as it started being applied to areas like finance. Other terms such as “distributed ledger technology” or DLT are now often used in these cases and they bear differences to the original bitcoin blockchain. But the promise of a system in which transactions can happen across a single record aimed at authentication is…