5G and blockchain empower each other and accelerate the digital economy

This year, many representatives and committee members put forward proposals related to "blockchain", involving various fields such as online game supervision, construction machinery, and medical informationization. In the local meetings that ended earlier, 26 provinces (autonomous regions, municipalities directly under the central government) included blockchain technology in their government work reports.

In the 14th Five-Year Plan, a separate chapter is set up to "accelerate digital development and build a digital China", in which "blockchain" is listed as a key industry of the digital economy. Obviously, vigorously promoting the development of blockchain technology and industry at the policy level has become a consensus of governments at all levels in my country, and the general trend of further accelerating the development of blockchain is unstoppable.

Of course, this wave of development dividends does not only belong to blockchain. Other scientific and technological revolutions and industrial revolutions with 5G, cloud computing, big data, the Internet of Things, and artificial intelligence as the core have continued to ferment and have been increasingly integrated into our social life.

These different technologies and industries can empower and promote each other. The mutual empowerment between 5G and blockchain is particularly anticipated by the technology industry. At the recent Second Blockchain Innovation and Industry Development Summit in Chengdu, some experts said that the blockchain 3.0 era is coming, and 5G is an accelerator for blockchain.

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5G and blockchain are both important "foundations" of the digital economy

Today, we are already quite familiar with both 5G and blockchain.

In terms of 5G, the 5G smartphone replacement trend has been rising for nearly two years, and my country has now achieved 5G network signal coverage in cities at the prefecture level and above. The characteristics of 5G high speed, low latency, and low power consumption are already well known to the public. Of course, because the various application ecosystems suitable for the 5G era are not yet mature, ordinary users do not yet have a strong sense of the revolutionary significance of 5G.

However, 5G has become an important foundation for promoting the development of the digital economy. There is no doubt that 5G will usher in a new era of intelligent interconnection of all things with a brand-new network architecture. The fact that the country has vigorously promoted the popularization of 5G networks and made it a core area of ​​new infrastructure also confirms this point.

In terms of blockchain, the general public’s understanding of the application of blockchain technology is more likely to be more inclined towards cryptocurrencies such as “Bitcoin”. However, at the policy level and in the industry, “industrial blockchain” has been identified as the biggest landing direction of blockchain in China.

On March 12, the 2nd Blockchain Innovation and Industry Development Summit was held in Chengdu. Many academicians and experts gave keynote speeches as "main speakers", and the 2020 Sichuan Blockchain Service Infrastructure-Shuxin Chain Application Case Library, "Sichuan Blockchain Industry White Paper (2020)", "Guide to Blockchain Applications in the Medical and Health Field" and other achievements were also released on site.

What is certain is that the deep integration of blockchain and various industries will play an important integrative role in China's future industrial foundation and industrial advantages under the trend of digitalization.

In short, today when the digital economy is booming, when we examine the trend of industrial digitalization from a bottom-up perspective, we can clearly see that 5G and blockchain have become important "foundations" to support the long-term development of the digital economy.

5G and blockchain are a match made in heaven

5G aims to realize the interconnection of all things, and blockchain aims to realize mutual trust among all things. There is a natural complementarity between the two. As mentioned above, the mutual empowerment of 5G and blockchain is highly anticipated by the industry. Because the mutual empowerment of the two will first make their respective development futures full of imagination.

On the one hand, in the 5G era, blockchain will usher in a trillion-level market opportunity. According to Gartner's technology maturity forecast, with the synergy of 5G, the adoption of blockchain technology will reach a certain level in the next five years, which will generate trillion-level economic benefits. This is actually easy to understand, because with the support of 5G, the power of blockchain can be more fully released, and there are two obvious points.

First, 5G can greatly improve the performance of blockchain. 5G's new network architecture can help blockchain promote the full utilization of network resources. In this way, the data synchronization efficiency and network communication speed of blockchain will be significantly improved.

Second, the development of 5G technology can expand the application scope of blockchain. A major bottleneck in the commercial application of the blockchain industry is the immaturity of the IoT infrastructure. The development and popularization of 5G technology can clear the biggest obstacle for the application of blockchain in the IoT.

On the other hand, blockchain empowers 5G, which will bring about a qualitative improvement in data security and sharing. Blockchain technology can achieve functions such as data privacy protection, historical record tamper-proofing, and traceability through encryption, which is beneficial for 5G to achieve true peer-to-peer value sharing and circulation.

At the same time, 5G's ultra-dense heterogeneous network structure requires a large number of small base stations to support it. This requires communication operators to achieve the rapid implementation of 5G under tremendous financial pressure through the decentralized, secure, and smart contract characteristics of blockchain.

There is a broad space for collaboration between 5G and blockchain. From a practical point of view, both of them also have a strong need to empower each other. The mutual empowerment of 5G and blockchain has become an inevitable trend.

5G+blockchain promotes the accelerated development of digital economy

It can be asserted that the magical chemical reaction produced by the mutual empowerment of 5G and blockchain will become a "rocket booster" for the further rapid development of the digital economy. We can make a specific analysis in the following three aspects.

First, 5G+blockchain will accelerate the implementation of application scenarios of both parties. As mentioned above, the mutual empowerment of 5G and blockchain can enable both parties to form a huge complementary effect and exert the huge efficiency of 1+1>2. Based on this, the application barriers of both parties in various fields such as smart cities, smart homes, Internet of Vehicles, smart manufacturing, smart logistics, etc. will be further removed, thereby greatly broadening the scope of scene application.

Second, 5G+blockchain can greatly promote the deep mining of data value. Data in the digital economy era is equivalent to coal and oil in the industrial era, and is the most fundamental driving force for social and economic development. So far, the confirmation of data ownership and value circulation have always faced serious technical difficulties. 5G+blockchain is the panacea to solve this technical problem, which can greatly promote the full utilization of data value from the two levels of efficiency and security.

Third, 5G+blockchain can improve the underlying productivity of the digital economy. The key and difficulty of the development of the digital economy is the digitization and intelligence of the real economy. Currently, this process is still at a relatively low stage due to the limitations of technological development. However, the mutual empowerment of 5G and blockchain is expected to break through the limitations of past technological development and fully unleash the powerful productivity of industrial digitization and intelligence.

Looking ahead, the digital economy will surely play a huge role in the operation of China's economic "internal circulation". The mutual empowerment of 5G and blockchain is destined to have unique value and significance in the digital economy era. So in different industrial fields, such as health, education, finance, industry, etc., what specific role will 5G+blockchain play has become a practical issue worth exploring.