The Trump Administration has included "distributed ledger technologies" (DLT), the grandaddy tech behind cryptocurrency and blockchain, in its strategy for preserving America's technological supremacy over China and Russia.
- DLT is one of 20 focus areas on the National Security Council's "critical and emerging technologies" shortlist, released Thursday.
- The NSC's strategy calls for investing in, developing, adopting and promoting the priority technologies.
- Also on the shortlist: AI, data science, quantum computing and "space technologies," weapons of mass destruction mitigation technologies, and others.
- Absent from the document: hard numbers and a concrete roadmap to implementation.
- Pockets of the U.S. government are already investing in blockchain infrastructure, the Department of Homeland Security most publicly so.
- The U.S. military is also examining DLT for combat operations, but efforts are still in their early stages.
- Chinese officials have long been bullish on DLT. A state-sanctioned distributed network for hosting dapps and internet services debuted months ago.
- It is not quite as clear where Russia stands on state-sponsored DLT use cases.