According to a report from STCN, Baidu (BIDU  ), the biggest search engine of China, has launched a public beta version of its blockchain service for businesses, called Xuperchain.

Xuperchain will use "parallel chain technology to simplify smart contract processing." Parallel chain technology is an upgrade from the current popularly used blockchain version 2.0 to blockchain 3.0.

The service of Xuperchain will enable small and medium businesses and developers easily launch so-called decentralized applications, or dapps. Xuperchain is just one of the hundreds of blockchain projects in the works in China, where President Xi Jinping recently called for the nation "to lead the world in blockchain technology development."

Baidu first revealed its plans for Xuperchain in September 2018. The Xuperchain website claims that since 2018, Xuperchain has processed over 450 million transactions and holds approximately 3.5 million users.

In terms of transaction processing speed, Xuperchain is reportedly 23x faster than Ethereum. While Ethereum is capable of executing 15 transactions per second, Xuperchain claims a peak concurrency of 353 transactions per second.

Technically, all blockchain networks are as fast as the weakest node in the system. At times, this leads to problems when trying to scale up a network. But in the case of Xuperchain, master nodes deploy a core's idle computing power to process parallel transactions. This design overcomes any latency issues and makes the Xuperchain network function much faster.

Baidu reportedly holds over 50 patents related to Xuperchain and the entire ownership of Xuperchain's intellectual properties.

STCN's report emphasized that Xuperchain will also be compliant with Chinese blockchain standards. Last January, China's internet censorship agency unveiled regulations that require any "entities or nodes" that provide "blockchain information services" to collect users' real names and national ID or telephone numbers. More than 500 projects had registered as of October 2019.

Blockchain purists would argue that this kind of centralized control defeats the purpose of the technology: shifting power to users and away from governments and banks.