China's blockchain and the United States officially form a "hard" fork, autonomous and controllable, and then the next city

Article ｜ Interchain Pulse · Yuanshang

"Hard" bifurcation is a term in the field of blockchain, which represents a permanent disagreement in the blockchain. It is appropriate to use this term to describe the future divergence of blockchain technology routes between China and the United States.

On April 9th, the blockchain software Rivus under Xita Technology has completed the adaptation of Huawei Kunpeng 920 processor. The relevant person in charge of Xita Technology stated that the "Rivus + Kunpeng" solution provides autonomous and controllable blockchain software systems for large institutions such as the government, which helps to achieve the strategic goal of localizing blockchain software.

This case is the first blockchain system to use Chinese processor hardware, and also marks the bifurcation of the Chinese blockchain system and the US blockchain system in the hardware environment.

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The fork is soft before hard

The Chinese blockchain and the US-based overseas blockchain have experienced three stages of "forking".

The first is the fork of the regulatory environment. The symbolic event at this stage is China's 9.4 supervision in 2017. Seven central ministries and other central committees issued the "Announcement on Preventing the Risk of Token Issuance and Financing", which cut off the blockchain as a set of technical systems and financial concomitant relations, promoting China Blockchain moves from financing function to application. In January 2019, the Internet Information Office issued the “Regulations for the Management of Blockchain Information Services”, which clarified the functions of its regulatory body. This means that China regards blockchain as an information service, just like the Internet.

The supervision of blockchain in the United States has always been around its financial attributes. The SEC (United States Securities Regulatory Commission) has become the main regulatory department. Its core job is to determine whether cryptocurrencies are not securities through Howe's test. However, the development and application of blockchain technology and the formulation of standards are all market-oriented behaviors, and the US regulatory authorities have not provided relevant guidelines.

Then the fork is blockchain software technology. Blockchain technology originated in Bitcoin, and several major original technologies have almost dominated the global blockchain system, including Ethereum, EOS, Fabric, Corda. But these technologies are controlled by a US-based development team.

In the early days, most of the blockchain systems of the Chinese team referred to the above mature systems, but they quickly digested and absorbed the code and developed the underlying blockchain technology with independent intellectual property rights. Such as Thunder Chain System, One Account Chain FIMX System, Baidu Super Chain System, Wezhong Bank ’s FISCO BCOS System, etc. These systems are all open source, showing code confidence.

The biggest difference between the blockchain system developed by the Chinese team and the main system developed by the US team is that it has higher performance requirements, generally handles TPS above 10,000, and confirms in seconds. This performance requirement should meet the needs of China's blockchain for practical applications, but sometimes sacrifices a certain amount of node deployment.

The independent symbol of China's blockchain system software is the launch of a series of Chinese standards. In February of this year, the Central Bank released the "Financial Distributed Ledger Technology Security Specification", and blockchain has standards in the financial field; in April, "Blockchain and Distributed Accounting Technology-Smart Contract Implementation Specification", "Block The two national standards of “Chain and Distributed Accounting Technology-Application Guide for Deposit Certificates” were approved. In addition, in the same month, the national standard "General Technical Conditions for Anti-counterfeiting Traceability Verification Based on Mobile Internet" participated by the blockchain technology was released. These standards reflect the differences between the Chinese blockchain system and the US blockchain system in many details. For example, "Financial Distributed Ledger Technical Security Specification" emphasizes the role of supervision.

The last fork is the hardware, which is also the most difficult. For a long time, Intel's X86 architecture processor was synonymous with commercial server processors. According to IDC statistics, throughout 2019, China's X86 server market shipped 3,177,540 units; the market size was US $ 17.684 billion (approximately RMB12.259 billion). Mainstream cloud manufacturers and most enterprise servers use X86 processors. This means that most blockchain systems are deployed on X86 architecture servers.

Until January last year, Huawei released the Kunpeng 920 chip, the industry's highest performance server processor based on the ARM architecture. This gives the market another option.

Blockchain's autonomous hardware

Before the Rivus of Xita was adapted to Kunpeng 920, some domestic enterprises have begun to replace Intel's X86 with Kunpeng 920.

In early April of this year, ICBC exclusively undertook financial services for Xiangjiang Kunpeng server industry chain.

In December last year, Huawei completed Kunming's end-to-end 4G / 5G core network cloud software and hardware to complete the internal and external field test of China Mobile. Among them, the total user capacity of IMS and EPC has increased by more than 30% compared with the first phase of network cloud. The overall test plan complies with China Mobile's NFV / SDN technical standard "three layers and one domain" architecture: the hardware uses Kunpeng ARM servers instead of x86 servers, and uses ARM-based distributed storage to perform ARM adaptation optimization on the virtual layer, MANO, and VNF. Introduce SDN to realize site networking.

In November last year, China Digital, as the main body of investment and operation, participated in the construction of the Kunpeng Supercomputing Center in Xiamen City.

In September last year, China Southern Power Grid's core information system began to deploy Kunpeng CPU chips independently developed by Huawei, gradually replacing US Intel CPUs. Not only that, Shenzhen Power Supply Bureau under China Southern Power Grid has fully deployed Huawei servers (based on Kunpeng chips) and Huawei storage systems. (Based on a storage control chip independently developed by Huawei), Huawei Gaussian Database, this is the first large-scale deployment of nationwide information software and hardware systems in the Chinese power industry.

According to an industry insider, the party, government, military industry, central enterprises and finance have requirements to gradually carry out autonomous and controllable replacement.

Xita Technology is one of the few private enterprises that adapts Kunpeng processor, and is the only blockchain enterprise that has been publicly disclosed.

This may be related to the business of Xita Technology. It is reported that Xita Rivis is mainly used in supply chain finance, smart government affairs, bill circulation, business collaboration, payment and other industries. Many customers of these businesses are government and financial institutions, so the adaptation of Xita Rivul to Kunpeng 920 helps to obtain orders from these institutions.

In addition, Kunpeng 920 may be more friendly to the blockchain system than Intel's X86. According to Xu Wenwei, director of Huawei's board of directors and chief strategic marketing officer, at the conference of Kunpeng 920, the Kunpeng 920 chip is designed for applications such as big data processing and distributed storage. This design is the ideal environment for blockchain.

In addition, from the perspective of basic computing performance, Huawei's Kunpeng 920 is also superior to Intel's X86.

Last year, IT Home conducted tests on Huawei Cloud using Kunpeng 920 processor and Alibaba Cloud using Intel x86 architecture processor. As a result, the advantages of Huawei Cloud in integer computing are more obvious, that is, it can better handle large-scale and high-intensity data processing tasks such as gene sequencing, image rendering, and big data.

(Source: IT House)

In the network test, the intranet bandwidth of Huawei Cloud KC1 instance is around 493,600 KB / s, and the intranet bandwidth of Alibaba Cloud G5 instance is around 188,800 KB / s. The Huawei Cloud KC1 intranet bandwidth has more advantages and is suitable for intranet server clusters composed of multiple servers with large data volumes.

(Source: IT House)

Xita's Rivos took the first step in using self-controllable hardware in China's blockchain system. It is believed that more domestic blockchain systems will be added in the future.

This article is the original of [Mutual Chain Pulse], original link: https://www.hulianmaibo.com/posts/info/44442 , please indicate the source!

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