China’s central bank is recruiting cryptocurrency and blockchain experts to explore the potential of distributed ledger technology in the financial sector.

With digitization becoming an integral part of China’s financial system, Chinese authorities are exploring uses for blockchain technology in improving its financial system. China is also planning to launch its own cryptocurrency.

The People’s Bank of China (PBoC), China’s central bank, has set up an R&D department for digital currency this year.  Currently, the PBoC website shows that the bank is recruiting blockchain and digital currency developers to fill six vacant positions at the department.

In January, PBoC held a seminar where it discussed technical issues on digital currency with market participants. PBoC has said it would speed up the R&D process and introduce a digital currency.

Zhu Jiawei, COO of Huobi, a Chinese bitcoin trading platform says blockchain technology has huge potential in bolstering the financial sector.

“There is room for improvement for blockchain in terms of its extensiveness, security and ecosystem. So it will still take a while to equip fintech platforms with blockchain technology,” he notes.

In the private sector, e-commerce giant Alibaba Group’s affiliate Ant Financial is leading the charge to develop blockchain.

“The blockchain platform we are building now is based on Ant’s solid capability of common object request broker architecture (Corba) and its strong network connectivity. We hope to launch our blockchain platform that can support large trading volume as early as this year,” notes Tong Ling, chief software architect of Ant Financial. Corba is a standard that facilitate the communication of systems deployed on various platforms.