Editor’s Note
During the evolution of industrial blockchain from “1 to 100,” blockchain alone cannot solve real-world problems—it must integrate with other technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and the Internet of Things (IoT). ZincLink therefore believes that the Industrial Blockchain 2.0 era is an era of technological convergence and upgrading.
Industrial blockchain remains in its 1.0 phase, where numerous opportunities still await exploration. As a media outlet deeply focused on industrial blockchain, ZincLink sees both these opportunities and the constraints and bottlenecks that hinder progress—making blockchain fall short of its promise to reduce trust friction and enhance social efficiency. In most practical scenarios, personal or institutional trust endorsements remain indispensable.
Quoting 19th-century American publishing magnate Joseph Pulitzer: “The press is the lookout on the bow of the ship of state. It must watch for storms and shoals and warn the pilot.”
ZincLink foresaw the emergence of industrial blockchain—and also anticipated its bottlenecks. Today, we identify the breakthrough: technological convergence.
This article presents reflections by economist Jiaming Zhu:
It is commonly assumed that the concept of “blockchain industry” was inspired by the “internet industry” concept—hoping to replicate the deep integration of internet technology with traditional industries, ultimately forming an industry ecosystem built upon blockchain. Such an aspiration is valid.
However, in real-world economic activities, progress in the blockchain industry has been far slower than expected—especially in replicating or transplanting lessons learned from industrial internet development. Moreover, no near-term breakthrough appears imminent. Thus, this phenomenon warrants serious reflection.
The Challenge of Industrial Blockchain: The Industrial Internet Model Is Not Replicable
Comparing blockchain and internet technologies across dimensions—including technical architecture, industrialization sequence, evolutionary mechanisms, application models, and scaling paradigms—reveals fundamental differences.
First, blockchain and internet technologies differ significantly. Internet technology integrates computer science, information technology, and telecommunications—comprising hardware, software, and applications. It possesses strong physical characteristics: its hardware layer includes data storage, processing, and transmission servers, plus network communication equipment. Network cables serve as foundational infrastructure—without them, there would be no internet. Mobile internet further depends on smartphones.
By contrast, blockchain technology builds upon mature and continuously evolving internet infrastructure. Its physical infrastructure—including hardware and even core “hard tech”—resides at the very bottom layer of the stack. Blockchain thus manifests more as non-hardware, non-material, and non-physical. People rarely perceive blockchain directly—it is largely “invisible and intangible,” making it inherently difficult to explain.
Second, their industrialization sequences differ. Internet history coincided with internet industry formation: early IT foundational technology development → IT product commercialization → component, module, and subsystem manufacturing → system-level IT integration → proliferation of internet hardware enterprises. Silicon Valley emerged as a direct result.
It was precisely within this context that Moore’s Law was formulated. For example, the transition from 4G to 5G in IoT generated new technologies, markets, and enterprises. Blockchain, however, cannot operate independently—it relies entirely on internet infrastructure. Consequently, in the short term, it is unlikely to foster a robust ecosystem of blockchain-specific hardware and software development firms. Achieving large-scale production and full industrialization will clearly take much longer.
Third, their evolutionary mechanisms differ. Internet history shows governments played pivotal roles in its early development. Later, international protocols—including TCP/IP and application-layer HTTP—solved cross-network interoperability issues, enabling rapid global expansion.
Blockchain evolved differently: Bitcoin catalyzed its global impact; Ethereum’s emergence occurred without government involvement. Subsequent adoption and expansion of private chains, public chains, and consortium chains likewise required no international protocol frameworks—because blockchain itself *is* a protocol, or inherently protocol-driven. It leverages internet infrastructure and layered protocols to deliver the functionalities and features now collectively termed “blockchain.” Yet blockchain protocols are naturally bounded by community governance, resulting in inherent cross-chain interoperability challenges.
Fourth, their application models differ. The internet is inherently platform-oriented—enabling low-cost, near-infinite human-to-human and human-to-information interaction (text, voice, images). It increasingly supports personalized information exchange and amplifies information resource aggregation.
Thus, the internet gave rise to Google (search), Facebook and Twitter (social platforms), and Amazon and Alibaba (e-commerce)—ultimately forging a new internet industry.
Such a trajectory is unlikely to repeat in blockchain applications anytime soon. Crucially, blockchain struggles to generate demand among near-infinite individuals who simultaneously become both users and creators of the technology.
Fifth, their scaling and diffusion paradigms differ. During internet industry formation, once “leading” enterprises emerged, they immediately triggered international demonstration effects—for instance, Amazon inspired Alibaba; Facebook and Twitter inspired WeChat.
Internet enterprises also exhibit mutual permeation: A spawns B; A and B inevitably lead to C. Furthermore, the internet industry strongly favors consumer-facing (C-end) advantages, whereas blockchain is predominantly business-facing (B-end) driven. Replicating internet application paradigms—or internet industry diffusion patterns—in blockchain contexts proves difficult. (In China, blockchain focuses more heavily on B-end applications, primarily due to policy direction.)
Industrial Blockchain Development Depends on Digital Transformation
First, industrial blockchain’s fundamental models impose significant developmental constraints. Currently, blockchain integration with industry manifests in three patterns:
1) Industries with innate genetic ties to blockchain—e.g., cryptocurrency industries represented by Bitcoin, and extended financial services;
2) Industries undergoing comprehensive transformation via blockchain—e.g., IP industries, legal services, and accounting;
3) Industries adopting blockchain while preserving original operational characteristics—e.g., agriculture, food processing, manufacturing, raw materials, energy, and transportation.
In practice, Pattern 1 exhibits relatively mature technology and high application potential—but faces regulatory oversight and public acceptance barriers. Pattern 2 offers broad growth space, yet exerts limited systemic economic impact.
In fact, Pattern 3—the so-called “real economy”—most urgently needs blockchain yet poses the greatest implementation challenges. Without blockchain integration into the real economy, industrial blockchain remains perpetually stuck at its initial stage. (This paragraph primarily describes the blockchain industry and its composition. In current media usage, “industrial blockchain” typically refers to blockchain solutions serving B-end enterprises—or traditional industries adopting blockchain technology.)
Second, realizing industrial blockchain requires prior digital transformation of the real economy. Integrating blockchain with traditional real-economy sectors demands a critical prerequisite: the real economy must first complete its digital transformation. Within the real economy, digitizing Industry—the secondary sector—or manufacturing, stands foremost.
In reality, globally only a few economies have adopted advanced digital technologies—encompassing power and renewable energy systems, software platforms, IoT, big data analytics, AI, and industrial robotics. By this standard, the vast majority of countries coexist with multiple industrial revolution-era production technologies.
Without foundational digital infrastructure in traditional real-economy sectors—and without integrating big data collection and analytics—directly introducing blockchain technology is virtually impossible. Conversely, if traditional manufacturing has already achieved digitalization and smart manufacturing, blockchain adoption becomes not only natural but also delivers significant added value.
Third, blockchain technology must address digital divides. Future blockchain industry goals should acknowledge uneven digitalization across countries, regions, and sectors—and prioritize building robust digital infrastructure, integrating cutting-edge digital technologies into existing production enterprises.
Meanwhile, digital manufacturing technologies require specific skills such as digital analytics. Only by eliminating the digital divide and promoting the real economy’s capacity to invest in, master, and deploy digital transformation—technologically and operationally—can blockchain technology achieve a solid foundation for application and adoption. Traditional real-economy sectors will only generate genuine demand for blockchain technology after completing their digital transformation; otherwise, premature implementation amounts to “pulling up seedlings to help them grow”—hastening results without achieving sustainable progress. In fact, this represents the current “bottleneck” hindering blockchain technology’s industrial transfer.
The integration of blockchain industry with traditional industries does not entail simply embedding blockchain technology into existing traditional sectors, but rather rebuilding these industries entirely on-chain. This parallels the evolution of the internet industry: for example, e-commerce is not merely a brick-and-mortar retailer launching a website—it is the complete re-creation of trade on the internet, representing an entirely new business model.
Similarly, integrating blockchain with industry is not about traditional enterprises developing a single blockchain application. Rather, it requires reconstructing entire industries on the blockchain—creating truly “on-chain industries,” not “blockchain + industry” or “industry + blockchain.”
The future of industrial blockchain lies in entirely new industries
Industrial structures are undergoing transformation, and blockchain technology must pioneer integrations with entirely new industries.
In the 1930s, British economist Colin Clark (1890–1962) systematically proposed the theory and methodology of “three-sector classification” in his book Conflicts Between Security and Progress, offering empirical analysis of post-Industrial Revolution industrial structural evolution.
Subsequently, it became widely accepted that before the Industrial Revolution, human economic activity centered primarily on primary industries such as agriculture, animal husbandry, and forestry; following the Industrial Revolution, machinery-based manufacturing gave rise to secondary industries, which replaced primary industries as the dominant force in national economies through industrialization; and by the mid-20th century, tertiary industries first emerged in developed countries, absorbing substantial capital and labor, ultimately supplanting secondary industries as the dominant sector.
However, nearly eight decades have passed since Clark introduced his three-sector classification framework—and today’s global industrial structure differs markedly from that of Clark’s era. The limitations and shortcomings of the “tertiary sector” framework—especially its third-sector taxonomy—have become increasingly evident.
Consequently, in response to the excessive breadth of the tertiary sector, knowledge- and science-intensive industries have been extracted to form a “fourth sector”; cultural and creative industries grouped into a “fifth sector”; and non-profit public services classified as a “sixth sector.”
The so-called “entirely new industries” with which blockchain must integrate include knowledge-, science-, culture-, and idea-driven industries. Blockchain’s integration with these new industries benefits from inherent digital advantages, faces strong intrinsic demand, and delivers demonstrable value upon implementation. Compared with traditional real-economy sectors, these new industries are no longer constrained by conventional production factors—capital, labor, and land—and their outputs are no longer bound by physical constraints: they do not wear out, depreciate, or become obsolete. Instead, these industries rely more heavily on information, data, knowledge, and ideas—with data being especially critical, emerging as the most vital production factor.
Thus, entirely new industries—particularly future-oriented, inherently virtual industries—stand to benefit most from blockchain technology. For instance, artistic creation processes—including visual arts, music, and dance—are already digital by nature. Intellectual property protection for resulting works, audience attention and experiential engagement, and art-market transactions will all be fundamentally transformed by blockchain technology.
Blockchain technology remains critically important for the future of financial services. Traditional finance—and its associated capital and money markets—must overcome severe monopolization and highly inequitable allocation of monetary and financial resources, gradually transitioning toward inclusive finance. Blockchain technology can help rebuild the future financial industry. Take “stablecoins,” for example: whether collateralized or algorithmically stabilized, they ultimately depend on blockchain infrastructure. Likewise, all forms of “tokens” presuppose blockchain technology as their foundational enabler.
Conclusion: Seeking an “Industrial Linkage” Mechanism
Within industrial economics lies the “industrial linkage theory,” emphasizing two core points: (1) inter-industry relationships involving intermediate inputs and intermediate outputs. Wassily Leontief’s “input-output” method provides analytical models and frameworks for quantifying such intermediate inputs and demands across industries. (2) Related industries progressively exhibit forward and backward linkages, along with broader ripple effects across the economy. The later-developed concept of “industrial chains” essentially describes this state of industrial linkage.
Today’s discussion of the blockchain industry must incorporate the concept of “industrial linkage.” The success of the internet industry owes much to such linkage mechanisms—expanding and deepening through intrinsic inter-industry connections.
Likewise, the blockchain industry must actively seek and establish “industrial linkage” mechanisms—building interconnected node systems and cultivating mutually influential, responsive, and interdependent relationships between industries and blockchain. Ultimately, this stimulates technological convergence, capital demand, and employment growth; enhances profitability and capital utilization efficiency for blockchain-adopting enterprises; and fosters a robust blockchain-based industrial chain—avoiding the “island effect” of fragmented, isolated blockchain applications.
Moreover, holistic development and upgrading of blockchain technology—and the expansion of its scientific foundations—are crucial to the formation and growth of the blockchain industry.