While crypto remains banned, China’s state-backed blockchain ecosystem — led by Conflux — is expanding across Asia and into global finance. Conflux Network bridges China’s academic research, state strategy, and open blockchain innovation.
Conflux Network has quietly become one of the most politically significant blockchains in the world — a rare hybrid that combines open-source technology with state approval in China.
While most public blockchains remain blocked or discouraged on the mainland, Conflux occupies a gray-yet-privileged zone: decentralized enough to interoperate with global crypto markets, yet compliant enough to fit within Beijing’s digital-finance strategy.
The idea took shape after China’s 2017 ICO ban, when regulators redirected attention from speculative tokens to what they called “blockchain as infrastructure.”
In 2018, a group of Chinese cryptographers led by Dr. Fan Long, a Tsinghua- and MIT-trained computer scientist, began developing a blockchain that could meet both academic performance standards and state compliance requirements.
Dr. Fan Long was part of the elite “Yao Class (姚班)” at Tsinghua University, created by Turing Award laureate Andrew Yao to train China’s next generation of computer scientists.
The early Conflux team included other high-profile Chinese researchers: Dr. Wu Ming, former senior scientist at Microsoft Research Asia, now chief scientist of Conflux; Dr. Guang Yang, a computer-architecture PhD appointed CTO in 2025; Shuo Wang, COO focused on partnerships; and algorithm engineers Liu Yanpei and Zhou Dong, who co-authored the Tree-Graph consensus design.
Chinese media dubbed them “the four Chinese elites of blockchain (华人四杰)” — underscoring Conflux’s academic pedigree and positioning within China’s Web3 research establishment.
In 2019, the project was officially incubated by the Shanghai Municipal Government through the Shanghai Science and Technology Committee, which recognized Conflux as part of the city’s Blockchain Innovation Base.
One year later, in January 2020, Shanghai vice-mayor Wu Qing and Professor Yao jointly inaugurated the Tree-Graph Blockchain Research Institute (树图区块链研究院) — the state-affiliated R&D center behind Conflux.
Beyond state incubation, Conflux attracted significant private and corporate backing, including Sequoia Capital China as an early investor; Huobi Ventures and OK Group as ecosystem partners; KuCoin Ventures and Circle Ventures through their investment in the Conflux-based stablecoin CNHC; and China Telecom, which partnered on blockchain-enabled SIM (BSIM) technology.
By October 2020, Conflux launched its mainnet, officially branded as China’s first compliant public chain — a project born from academia, legitimized by government, and funded by both venture and industry capital.
Conflux is designed as an “everything chain” — an attempt to merge the strongest ideas from across the blockchain spectrum into a single, unified architecture.
At its core, Conflux is a permissionless Layer-1 public blockchain that fuses the linearity of blockchains with the parallelism of DAGs through its proprietary Tree-Graph consensus, which inspired its Chinese name “树图” (“Tree-Graph”).
This hybrid design lets multiple blocks be created and validated simultaneously, preserving the order and security of a blockchain while achieving the concurrency of a graph system.
The network also blends Proof-of-Work security with Proof-of-Stake-style governance and rapid finality, creating a dual-engine consensus model that balances decentralization, performance, and regulatory traceability.
Current throughput is declared at around 3,000 transactions per second, with the forthcoming Conflux 3.0 aiming for 15,000 TPS and sub-second confirmations.
Compatibility was another unifying goal. Conflux is fully EVM-compatible, supporting all standard Ethereum tools — from MetaMask wallets to Solidity smart contracts — and it extends that functionality through two dedicated scaling layers:
From its earliest days, the Conflux team pursued an ambitious deployment agenda. As its consensus and architecture matured, they pushed for global node rollout and network scale. Reportedly, Conflux now operates more than 4,300 nodes across over 20 countries, processing around 1.5 billion transactions since launch — a scale that places it among Asia’s largest permissionless networks.
Unlike Ethereum or Solana, whose validator communities expanded organically through open-market participation, Conflux’s rollout has been strategically orchestrated. Its validator network combines government-backed institutions, academic research partners, and enterprise infrastructure providers, reflecting China’s concept of guided decentralization.
In China and Hong Kong, core R&D and operational clusters are maintained by the Tree-Graph Blockchain Research Institute, the Shanghai Science and Technology Committee, and affiliated university labs at Tsinghua and Shanghai Jiao Tong.
Across Southeast Asia, nodes are hosted through partners such as OKX, KuCoin, and local developer communities in Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam, extending Conflux’s reach into regional exchange and DeFi ecosystems.
Further deployments appear in Kazakhstan under the Astana International Financial Centre, as well as validator clusters in the UAE, Germany, and Canada, run by infrastructure and enterprise partners.
This model contrasts sharply with Western blockchain growth: Ethereum’s openness and Solana’s performance-centric concentration give way here to a policy-driven federation — a network built for scale, compliance, and coordination, mirroring China’s broader digital-infrastructure strategy of global reach under deliberate control.
Conflux’s adoption has also followed a distinctly policy-driven path, with three main waves:
In its early stage, Conflux was tested in Chinese supply-chain tracking, data provenance, and digital certificate applications. Trials ran in Shanghai and Hunan free-trade zones, using Conflux as a ledger layer for public utilities, document registration, and trusted record-keeping.
Importantly, Conflux never leaned on speculative applications or meme tokens — its roadmap skipped over hype cycles to focus on real infrastructure use. What it offered was blockchain’s promise to institutions: immutability, traceability, and integration with existing systems, without relying on speculation.
After the initial enterprise and municipal trials, Conflux’s strongest real-world use case emerged through its partnership with China Telecom. The collaboration marked a turning point — not a consumer experiment, but a large-scale integration of blockchain with China’s existing telecom and compliance infrastructure.
Together, the two organizations developed the Blockchain SIM (BSIM) — a next-generation SIM card that embeds a secure cryptographic module capable of storing and managing private keys directly on the chip. Unlike software-based wallets, BSIM hardware provides native identity authentication, transaction signing, and encryption at the telecom layer, allowing users to interact with blockchain applications as easily as sending a text message.
Technically, each BSIM card integrates Conflux’s public-key cryptography protocols and hardware-level wallet management, enabling on-chain interactions that meet China’s strict KYC and data-residency requirements.
This design makes Conflux’s network interoperable with regulated payment systems and mobile networks — a fusion of telecom-grade security and blockchain transparency.
The latest phase brings Conflux directly into China’s broader effort to internationalize the digital yuan by creating compliant, offshore yuan-backed stablecoins that can circulate outside the mainland.
The first of these projects, CNHC, launched in Hong Kong, leveraging the city’s new Virtual Asset Service Provider (VASP) regime to issue a CNH-pegged stablecoin (offshore yuan). Built on Conflux’s EVM-compatible infrastructure, CNHC is backed 1:1 by CNH reserves held under local financial supervision, with Circle Ventures and KuCoin Ventures among its early investors.
Hong Kong’s position as a semi-autonomous financial hub allows CNHC to act as a regulatory bridge, giving Chinese companies and cross-border traders exposure to blockchain-based yuan without violating the mainland’s crypto restrictions.
While the volumes remain close to zero, the CNHC experiment in Hong Kong served as a prototype for the first internationally regulated yuan-backed stablecoin — a policy and technical milestone rather than a market-driven success.
In July 2025, Conflux partnered with AnchorX and Eastcompeace to launch AxCNH (also known as CNYC Coin) within the Astana International Financial Centre (AIFC) framework — a special economic zone aligned with China’s Belt & Road Initiative.
AxCNH operates as a fully collateralized digital-yuan derivative, designed for cross-border trade settlement, fintech remittances, and digital-asset clearing between Belt & Road economies. The AIFC’s flexible regulatory regime allows the token to function legally while maintaining yuan parity through licensed custodians and on-chain proof-of-reserve audits.
Together, these Hong Kong and Kazakhstan initiatives illustrate how Conflux serves as the blockchain infrastructure behind China’s offshore currency experiments — extending the usability of the yuan through regulated digital instruments.
Rather than replacing the digital yuan, these projects complement it, creating a multi-jurisdictional RMB ecosystem where Conflux acts as the underlying protocol for cross-border payments, trade finance, and on-chain liquidity routing — effectively pushing China’s blockchain ambitions behind the wall and beyond.
The leading decentralized exchange on the Conflux network, Swappi, provides trading liquidity for USDT, CNHC, and CFX, and serves as the gateway for most on-chain activity within Conflux’s eSpace environment. Swappi mirrors the role of Uniswap on Ethereum — an essential liquidity hub that allows users to move between stablecoins and native assets without leaving the ecosystem.
Flux Protocol represents the network’s primary DeFi lending market, connecting Conflux with BNB Chain and other EVM-compatible blockchains. It enables cross-chain collateralization and borrowing, supporting a small but growing base of institutional and retail users experimenting with compliant DeFi under Conflux’s technical and policy constraints.
For governance, TreeGraph DAO coordinates validator participation and manages on-chain voting, reflecting Conflux’s hybrid approach to decentralization — open to community contribution but still guided by institutional oversight.
Finally, Space ID Asia extends Conflux’s reach into digital identity, offering domain-name registration and decentralized identity (DID) services localized for Asian markets. The project integrates blockchain-based identity into a region where regulatory compliance and verified digital credentials are becoming central to fintech innovation.
While Conflux’s activity remains concentrated in Asia, it maintains connectivity to global infrastructure:
The native token CFX powers gas, staking, and governance.
Supply is capped at 5 billion, with about 3 billion circulating.
| Period | Price Range | Key Events |
|---|---|---|
| Launch (2020) | ≈ $0.10 | Mainnet debut |
| Peak (2021) | ≈ $1.50 | NFT and mining boom |
| Low (2022) | ≈ $0.02 | Post-ban downturn |
| Rally (2023) | ≈ $0.40 | China Telecom BSIM news |
| 2025 Average | $0.20 – 0.25 | Stable policy phase |
Staking yields hover around 7 – 8 %, with halving every four years.
CFX trades mainly on Binance, OKX, and KuCoin, with volume peaking during Chinese market hours.
Analysts view it as a “China-policy proxy token” — moving in response to government Web3 or digital-yuan announcements.