The Chinese state-backed enterprise blockchain, Chang’an Chain or ChainMaker, is beginning to take shape. This week, Chinese state media reported that the blockchain is backed by 1,000 strong clusters of high-performance servers and claims to process 240 million transactions per second.

Supporting the development of ChainMaker is an ecosystem of 50 organizations that are mainly state owned. These include China Construction Bank, State Grid, food company COFCO, and China Unicom, which is using it for 5G services.

In 2021, we reported that ChainMaker was powered by 96 core chips and was claimed to support 100,000 transactions per second (TPS) by running them in parallel. Now the figure is 240 million TPS.

Putting these figures in context, most enterprise blockchains normally work until 10,000 to 20,000TPS. However, it appears that the claimed massive speeds are being achieved through a combination of software and hardware with the non-trivial task of distributing the load across a pool of 1000 high performance machines and chips. ChainMaker is said to respond to blockchain queries in milliseconds.

Also, in November 2022, it was reported that a new immutable storage system, ‘Hong’, was developed for ChainMaker with a petabyte of storage with plans to open it up. Some of the ChainMaker code is available under the Apache 2 open source license.

The Beijing Microchip Edge Computing Research Institute (BABEC) is one of the main developers of the solution.

While the ChainMaker solution is said to support encryption and other privacy-preserving technologies, it is being used for highly sensitive data ranging from ID cards and business licenses to facial recognition. The purpose of business blockchains is to enable the exchange of data between businesses. For government applications, ChainMaker is said to “promote information sharing between departments.”

One of ChainMaker’s big deployments was announced this week with the release of Beijing Directory Chain 2.0. This city’s big data solution supports 80 departments linking 2,700 information systems.