China Seizes the Blockchain Opportunity. How Should the US Respond?

Michael J. Casey is CoinDesk’s chief content officer and a senior advisor for blockchain research at MIT’s Digital Currency Initiative.

The following article originally appeared in CoinDesk Weekly, a custom-curated newsletter delivered every Sunday exclusively to our subscribers.

The Chinese government is not in the habit of making speculative “what if” announcements. Typically, before anything about its plans goes public, a significant amount of preparation and thought has gone into it.

So, although Xi Jinping’s passing statement about China needing to “seize the opportunity” posed by blockchain technology was thin on details, it’s unwise to assume nothing will come of it. In fact, as CoinDesk’s David Pan will report on Monday, there’s already a massive amount of blockchain development going on in China.

How should the U.S. react to this? Definitely not with complacency.

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