China’s Ministry of Public Security has developed a blockchain-based system in an effort to securely store evidence collected during police investigations.

According to data released by China’s Intellectual Property Office on Tuesday May 9, the ministry’s research institute filed a patent application early in November 2017 for a blockchain-based system. The system could timestamp and store data submitted to the cloud in a bid to provide a secure data storage procedure featured by more transparency and tamperproof.

With centralized cloud platforms becoming an increasingly popular approach to share data, the security ministry who supervises all the country’s police forces is facing a potential problem in the current storage process – evidence sent via cloud platform could easily be tampered. Considering that, the authority figures out adopting blockchain technology to prevent the data from modification in the process of evidence collecting and later storage. In the meantime, it could also provide privacy protection.

The Ministry of Public Security was among the very first government organs of China. The move shows a positive attitude from Chinese government in embracing and promoting the emerging blockchain technology.

As an underpinning technology inherently resistant to modification of data, blockchain could play a supportive role in businesses requiring openness and transparency together with other edge-cutting technologies. China has shown strong ambitions for applying this new technology in businesses both at the enterprise level and government level.

The 2017 Global Blockchain Patents Ranking shows that blockchain patents from China-based enterprises account for 49% among 1060 pieces of blockchain patents worldwide.

As for governmental efforts, China’s PBoC institute has launched a blockchain-as-a-service (BaaS) platform for registry, aiming to store statistics of digital identity, credit data and digital credentials to provide verifiable and supervised ownership registries by using blockchain technology. And China’s National Audit Office is recently openly talking about applying blockchain solutions for storing audit data it gathers from provincial and local level bureaus.

Earlier this month, it was reported that 12 out of 26 Chinese banks have already adopted blockchain technology in various application scenarios.

The industrial prosperity urges the rollout of relevant standards, and today a government official confirmed that national blockchain standards are expected to be rolled out by 2019.