China Sets 2030 Target to Complete National Blockchain Network

2030 Deadline in the Informatization Plan

China intends to largely complete a national blockchain network by 2030, under the 15th Five-Year Plan for National Informatization published Friday by the Central Cyberspace Affairs Commission. The commission is a senior body inside the Communist Party that coordinates the country's digital development policy, and its plan functions as the top-level blueprint for state informatization work through the end of the decade. The plan document directs deeper blockchain use in trade and finance across the Yangtze River Delta, and deployment at scale in manufacturing and agriculture in the Chengdu and Chongqing region of southwestern China. Beyond the regional assignments, it calls for stronger blockchain technical standards and wider use of the technology in data circulation and trading. Standardization is treated as a workstream of its own: the document ties industrial adoption to common rules for how distributed ledgers record and exchange data. The publication sits inside a broader five-year informatization program, the 15th of its kind, which frames blockchain alongside other state technology priorities rather than as a standalone initiative. For planners, the network is infrastructure in the same sense as cloud platforms or government data systems, something ministries, state firms and provincial governments are expected to build on. That framing matters for how the deadline will be measured: the plan's own language, “largely complete,” leaves room for phased rollout, with regional pilots in the Yangtze River Delta and the southwest expected to lead. Friday's publication notice, issued through the commission's official channel, confirms the document's status as an active planning instrument rather than a discussion draft. Provincial implementation plans and sector standards are the next documents to watch, since those will translate the national target into procurement and buildout schedules.

From March Blueprint to Dated Target

The 2030 date did not appear without warning. China's national development plan, released in March, already listed the blockchain network buildout among its projects, and a joint policy from the party's central leadership and the State Council published on October 9 called for pushing its construction forward. What the new five-year plan adds is specificity: earlier documents directed that the network be built, while this one fixes 2030 as the point by which the work should be mostly finished. The October 9 paper also came from the top of the system, since the State Council is China's chief administrative authority and joint party-state documents carry binding weight across ministries. The sequencing shows a policy pipeline in motion, from a broad directive in March, to coordinated instruction in October, to a dated target under the informatization plan. The same pipeline excludes one area entirely. Mainland China prohibits digital asset business activity, so no part of the buildout involves token issuance, token trading or venues of the kind a crypto exchange operates. That split between technology and tokens is longstanding. In October 2019, President Xi Jinping urged greater investment in blockchain, calling it an important field for building China's own technological capabilities, a statement that kicked off state-level blockchain spending without any relaxation of the trading prohibition. The new plan follows the same pattern. It funds infrastructure, sets regional use cases and directs standards work, while the prohibition on digital asset business stands as it has for years. Officials framing the plan have emphasized industrial application and standardization over market development, and nothing in the document suggests a review of the trading prohibition. For global firms, the practical reading is that China's blockchain market is a procurement market for infrastructure and integration services, not a market open to token products.

Infrastructure, Not Token Markets

In our reading, the plan steers China's blockchain spending toward permissioned, state-coordinated infrastructure rather than public token networks. The likely shape is a controlled mesh of blockchain nodes operated by approved entities, not an open layer-1 blockchain protocol competing for users and validators. The standards mandate is the lever that matters most over the next two years: rules covering data formats and consensus mechanism requirements will decide how trade, manufacturing and agricultural systems interoperate, and the body that writes them controls the integration layer for every participant. Nothing in the document relaxes the trading prohibition, so the network's economics will run on state procurement and enterprise contracts, not token markets. The standard-setting drafts that follow the plan are the concrete milestone to track.