CoinDesk's Consensus 2019 brought together the blockchain industry's power brokers, Fortune 500 executives, policymakers, academic researchers, and thousands of developers and investors hunting for th
CoinDesk's Consensus 2019 brought together the blockchain industry's power brokers, Fortune 500 executives, policymakers, academic researchers, and thousands of developers and investors hunting for the next breakthrough. Among the week's sessions, a panel organized by Spark Blockchain stood as the only one specifically comparing how China and the United States are positioning themselves as blockchain technology races forward.
The "China and the U.S." panel seated six industry figures: Maggie Wu, CEO of Krypital Group; Chunru Cherie Liu, Head of the MOAC Foundation in the U.S.; Yubo Ruan, founder of 8 Decimal Capital; Elon Huang, who co-founded MatrixONE; Yunpeng Ding, handling international business development at GXChain; and Tong Shen, co-founder of both Block Kingdom and Spark Blockchain.
Panelists kept returning to one challenge: getting ordinary people to use blockchain applications. Wu pressed this hard. "Mass adoption of dApps which consumers will actually use is one of the critical opportunities, and there will be a dark horse that bridges blockchain to mass adoption," she said. The problem isn't technical anymore. It's convincing humans to care.
Ruan offered historical perspective. He compared the blockchain sector's current state to where the internet stood in 1999. The scale matters: by Ruan's reading of adoption curves, blockchain and crypto sit at 2.5 percent penetration globally, the early-adopter phase. In 1999, during the dot-com era, 250 million people used the internet. Today that number sits at 4 billion. Ding from GXChain shared the optimism. "China and the U.S. are leading the global blockchain industry, and it wouldn't take much time for the Chinese and American markets to adopt blockchain nationally," he said.
When panelists discussed concrete applications, common use cases surfaced. Liu summarized the U.S. landscape: "Payment, shared trading, online ID, loyalty rewards and transactions are the top use cases in the U.S." Ding highlighted GXChain's own approach, building what he called "a public blockchain for global data economy" that lets enterprises and individuals transact with data as an asset. MatrixONE's Huang pointed to a gap: major consumer and industrial brands had barely entered blockchain. He believed institutions would drive adoption through "institution-grade financing and its platform-based tools."
Shen from Block Kingdom made a bolder prediction: blockchain integrated with gaming would become the most significant category for consumer adoption within five years. Games face an inherent problem. Players sink time and money into digital assets that game companies then control. Blockchain could rewrite that relationship, Shen argued, by giving players ownership of in-game items and the ability to trade them.
The panel pivoted to regulation, where views differed sharply. Wu argued that "favorable regulations such as ETF approvals will ignite the next bull market." Huang took a more foundational stance. "Compliance, auditability and privacy come before profitability—three elements which are necessary for the future of cryptocurrency," he said. The order matters: legitimacy precedes profits.
Panelists addressed how China and the U.S. chart different courses. Ruan observed that China's blockchain efforts leaned toward business-model innovation while the U.S. pushed harder on infrastructure development. Liu expanded on the split. The U.S., she said, approached blockchain as either a technological tool or philosophical concept. China saw it as leverage, a chance to leapfrog competitors and reposition itself globally. U.S. companies fixated on financial services, payments and transactions. Chinese companies pursued broader integration with existing industries.
The panel wrapped with optimism about Bitcoin's long-term prospects, panelists agreeing that serious opportunities emerge from serious challenges.
CoinDesk streamed the session live, drawing attention from industry veterans, blockchain analysts, and reporters covering the crypto beat.
