Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei believes that China can issue a Libra-like currency to take the lead in the blockchain sector.

Huawei, the world’s No.1 telecom supplier and No.2 phone manufacturer, is currently making some of the biggest waves in the wireless industry, and meanwhile running into its biggest trouble in 2019 for the U.S. ban.

Chinese version of Libra?

When asked during an interview with Italian media whether Facebook’s Libra releases a signal that the U.S. tech enterprises are working in line with the U.S. government to maintain their hegemony over the world and whether the social giant will consider to include Chinese companies or China’s fiat currency. The 74-year-old entrepreneur and engineer replied that

“China can issue a Libra-like currency as well. Why do we have to wait for others? The power of a country is always stronger than an Internet company after all.”

The remark comes after concerns from People’s Bank of China (PBoC), the country’s central bank, that Libra could pose a challenge to the country’s economy in some aspects.

In fact, the PBoC was one of the earliest central banks to start digital currency innovation. In response to the challenge from cryptocurrencies like bitcoin posed, the program started early in 2014. Currently, the PBOC has been working with market institutions on creating a central bank digital currency and the program has already been approved by the State Council.

Huawei’s blockchain strategy

Huawei is an early blockchain pioneer in the country. Early in 2016, it joined the Linux Foundation-led Hyperledger blockchain consortium (the most influential open source project in blockchain sector); in March 2018, the firm released BCS (Blockchain Service), a cloud blockchain service platform focusing on helping companies create enterprise-level blockchain solutions and applications; in April 2018, Huawei released its blockchain white paper detailing the blockchain service( BCS) offered by Huawei’s cloud unit.

“Blockchain technology would be adopted by a majority of enterprises in the future, and it needs to run on the cloud. While it seems impossible for enterprises to develop their own blockchain, so they may choose to run on Aliyun (cloud of Alibaba), Huawei Cloud or AWS. It is in fact a quite large blue ocean (uncontested market). Suppose you just take a 5% share of the current public cloud market to blockchain, that is a market worth $ 8.5 billion.” said Huawei’s former chief expert in blockchain Huang Lianjin.