Chinese blockchain and crypto trends to watch with Yifan He, Red Date Technology

Interview with Yifan He, Founder and CEO of Red Date Technology by Selva Ozelli Esq, CPA who is an international digital asset legal  expert  and author of Sustainably Investing in Digital Assets Globally.  Her  writings are translated into 45 languages and republished in over 200 global publications.  She is recognized as an expert media/TV commentator on global digital asset regulation, tax and technology matters.

Yifan He interviewed

Yifan He is the founder and CEO of Red Date Technology, a Hong Kong-based technology firm known primarily as the technical architect behind China’s Blockchain-based Service Network (BSN) and the UDPN (Universal Digital Payments Network) in the global financial industry

Founded in 2014, Red Date Technology initially focused on “smart city” technology before pivoting to blockchain in 2018. The company is the driving force behind several major global infrastructure projects:

Blockchain-based Service Network (BSN): A state-sanctioned initiative in China aimed at providing a low-cost, unified infrastructure for deploying and managing blockchain applications.

BSN Spartan Network: An international, non-cryptocurrency public chain infrastructure designed for global enterprises to use blockchain technology without regulatory or financial volatility.

Universal Digital Payments Network (UDPN): A messaging layer intended to connect different central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), commercial bank tokenized deposits, and stablecoins, similar to a “SWIFT for digital money”.

China RealDID: A national-level blockchain-based identity verification system launched in China to manage digital IDs.

Tell us about your educational and professional journey that led you to founding Red Date Technology

My background combines technology, finance, and long-term infrastructure thinking. I studied computer science at SUNY Stony Brook and later completed an MBA at MIT Sloan. I started my first internet company while still in college in the United States, and then spent many years in China working across finance, private equity, and large-scale technology projects.

When I founded Red Date in 2014, the company initially focused on smart city and large-scale digital infrastructure. In 2018, China elevated blockchain to a national strategic priority. Around the same time, I had become convinced that distributed systems would be part of the next generation of public digital infrastructure and the internet, much as cloud computing had become essential to the last generation. That was the moment we moved decisively into blockchain.

Red Date Technology from the beginning has been focused on implementing blockchain infrastructure globally as opposed to selling tokens.  Tell us why.

On top of today’s internet stack, a new layer will be added specifically to support distributed systems. This new layer will enable multiple-system communications and applications, unlike the traditional layer, which only handles system-to-system bilateral communications.

That is where blockchain has enormous long-term value. The new multi-party IT architecture should apply to all industries, all nations, and all applications. It should not, and will not, be limited to cryptocurrencies. There is a much greater good that this technology can bring to the world.

We identified that the early adoption of the decentralized technologies would come from two main non-cryptocurrency industries: banking/payments and government identities. The value propositions are clear and immediate. That’s why five years ago, we began moving into these two industries from just building blockchain infrastructures.

That same logic also explains why Red Date’s business is increasingly concentrated around two areas: digital currency infrastructure and identity infrastructure.

Tell us about Blockchain-based Service Network (BSN)

BSN was created to make blockchain deployment more practical and more accessible. The basic idea was simple: blockchain infrastructure should become easier to deploy, cheaper to operate, and more standardized, much like cloud infrastructure did for traditional IT. BSN was designed as a multi-chain infrastructure network that enables public and private distributed systems to be deployed in cloud or on-premises environments for various types of distributed applications. BSN is not a blockchain. It is a system designed to standardize the deployment of all blockchains and DLT-based applications across cloud infrastructure in an easy, affordable, and efficient way.

Tell us about the BSN Spartan Network

BSN Spartan Network is Red Date’s answer to a very practical market problem: public chains are useful, but many enterprises do not want the volatility of cryptocurrency, the unpredictability of gas fees, or the operational burden of handling crypto directly. Spartan keeps the programmability and openness of public-chain architecture while removing the need for transferable crypto gas tokens in day-to-day enterprise use — a kind of “decentralized AWS” for public-chain infrastructure.

Tell us about Universal Digital Payments Network (UDPN)

UDPN has two main products: UDPN Token-based Core Banking System and the UDPN Kissen Network

The UDPN Core Banking system was built to serve as a token sub-ledger in a bank. We believe that all commercial banks over the next 10 years will implement some form of token system within their core banking systems, such as tokenized deposits, stablecoins, or CBDCs.  Today, any technically capable team can deploy a token contract. But the real challenge is everything around regulated money and compliance: wallet and account lifecycle management, enterprise integration, bank controls, governance, FX coordination, settlement logic, auditability, accounting, reconciliations, AML, KYC, compliance across jurisdictions, and the upcoming agent-initiated payments.

That is why the UDPN Core Banking System is not about “building a stablecoin or token.” It is about building the operating infrastructure around regulated stablecoins and tokenized deposits, so that banks and enterprises can issue, manage, connect, settle, and interoperate in a controlled and compliant way. We see the real value not at the token layer, but at the bank-grade operating layer.

The UDPN Kissen network is built to connect all such token-based core banking systems globally, just like the SWIFT system connecting all fiat-based core banking ledgers today.

Over the past five years, we have developed UDPN together with a range of global partners. Our focus has always been practical: giving financial institutions and enterprises the infrastructure they need to bring digital currencies into real-world operations.

Tell us about RealIDID

The RealDID technology represents Red Date’s second major strategic pillar: identity infrastructure. This technology fundamentally transforms the entire verification process for government IDs and related digital business credentials beyond traditional document-centric human-read verification.

Public reporting describes China RealDID as the world’s first national-level decentralized identity system, launched through cooperation with the Ministry of Public Security’s First Research Institute, to allow people to prove identity in a privacy-preserving way while still meeting real-name compliance requirements in China.

With this technology, real-world identities can be bound to decentralized identifiers and used across different systems without forcing users to repeatedly hand over raw personal data. That creates a very different future for KYC, access control, digital business credentials, and cross-border verification. This is much bigger than simply “logging in with blockchain.” It is about building identity infrastructure for digital finance, digital services, and eventually AI-driven transactions with accountability.

Until now, Red Date has remained the only technology provider in this sector with a proven track record of delivering government-backed decentralized identity and credential solutions.

Tokenization of the global financial markets, Hollywood, Sports & Prediction Markets Betting, Social Media Accounts are in focus with Hong Kong as a financial center and Red Date Technology playing a pivotal role in architecting the new global tokenization framework aimed at facilitating digital payments/stablecoins, regulated digital currencies, NFTs and central bank digital currencies (CBDCs).  Tell us why.

In the early days of the internet, email and the web were the two foundational applications that showed people the real power of the internet technologies. Once those two core use cases were established, many other internet products and services could grow on top of them.

We believe the same logic applies to the broader tokenization market today. Payment and identity are the two foundational applications. With the broader adoption of token-based digital currencies and digital identities, the acceleration of distributed technologies can drive, over time, the formation of a true global public ecosystem for tokenization and decentralized applications.

In this context, Hong Kong is central to the story because it is one of the few places actively trying to build a regulated bridge between traditional finance and digital asset infrastructure. Red Date is actively working with institutions and businesses in Hong Kong to help realize that vision.

Which parts of tokenization which covers a very wide spectrum in the USA as detailed in question 7 allowed in Hong Kong.  For example, is sports betting and prediction market tokenization, or paying digital currencies to people who watch movies allowed in Hong Kong?

The clean answer is that Hong Kong is clearly opening up regulated digital asset and tokenization activity, but not all “tokenization” use cases are treated equally.

In my view, token-based core banking and tokenized finance will be one of the biggest long-term trends. Hong Kong has already moved beyond discussion and into implementation. On April 10, 2026, the HKMA granted the first stablecoin issuer licenses under its new regime, marking the beginning of a regulated stablecoin market in Hong Kong. That is an important signal.

Prediction markets are very different. Just days ago, Hong Kong’s Investor and Financial Education Council warned that trading activities in prediction markets may constitute illegal gambling in Hong Kong. So I would be very cautious about putting prediction-market tokenization or sports-betting tokenization in the same category as regulated financial tokenization. There are many legal activities in the U.S. that are considered criminal around the world. Prediction markets have nothing to do with tokenization. They are just adopting cryptocurrencies and stablecoins as anonymous payment methods.

You are an advocate of Web3 and decentralized web initiatives often associated with proponents of the fifth industrial revolution.  Tell us where you see the developments in this area.

I see this as an irreversible technology trend, especially now that AI agents are maturing and the limitations of current infrastructure are becoming more obvious. Blockchain has already moved far beyond the narrow cryptocurrency narrative. But Web3 only becomes meaningful when it leaves the crypto-native bubble and becomes part of mainstream IT infrastructures and applications serving real-world use cases.

The next stage is not simply more tokens or more chains. It is the fusion of programmable money, programmable identity, and programmable authorization inside institutions and enterprise systems. In the earlier internet, identity was largely platform-controlled. In the next wave, identity needs to become portable, verifiable, and selectively disclosable. That is why DID and VC matter so much. The winning models will be those that enable institutions to adopt decentralized capabilities without sacrificing compliance, governance, performance, or legal accountability.

Red Date Technology’s focus has expanded significantly into the intersection of blockchain and Artificial Intelligence (AI), specifically addressing the infrastructure needs for AI agents to interact with financial systems and verifiable data.  Tell us more about this.

AI agents are not useful in finance unless three questions are answered very clearly: who is the agent, who authorized it, and what exactly is it allowed to do. Payments and financial actions cannot be safely delegated to AI without identity, authorization, auditability, and revocation. In our view, this is fundamentally a DID/VC problem sitting on top of a payment infrastructure problem.

From Red Date’s point of view, this is not really about “AI on the blockchain.” It is about making AI operable inside regulated systems. A human or an enterprise should be able to bind an AI agent to a verifiable identity framework, issue credentials that define scope and permissions, and let that agent interact with token-based financial infrastructure under policy control.

We are in the process of setting up a comprehensive AI Agent identity and accountability infrastructure in China and Hong Kong with support from various government agencies.

Red Date Technology rather than owning physical data centers, provides software infrastructure that integrates into existing physical data centers to manage blockchain , AI and Web3 applications.  With orbital data centers becoming a reality will your company develop the needed software infrastructure that integrates into existing orbital data centers to manage blockchain, AI  and Web3 applications?

Orbital data centers are an extension of a broader trend we have been watching: the separation of where infrastructure is physically located from the software layers that operate digital systems on top of it. At Red Date, we build the operating layer that sits above infrastructure, whether that infrastructure is on-premise, in conventional cloud environments, in sovereign data centers, or in the future, potentially in orbital environments.

So from our perspective, orbital data centers would simply be another execution environment. If they become commercially viable, we would not need to reinvent our stack — we simply extend it.

For a country or a company or an organization what  are the advantages of developing an AI infused CBCD,  stablecoin, token, NFT, digital asset infrastructure?

In the coming years, AI agents will increasingly handle operational tasks that are still initiated manually today — such as making payments, managing treasury workflows, conducting settlement instructions, triggering asset transfers, or interacting with service providers and counterparties. For that to happen safely in financial environments, the infrastructure must be designed to support non-human actors in a controlled and accountable way.

That said, the key requirement is trust. An AI agent cannot simply act like an anonymous software tool. The system must be able to verify who the agent represents, what it is authorized to do, under what conditions it can act, and who is ultimately accountable for its actions. This is why digital asset infrastructure must evolve together with DID and VC technologies.

These are still very new areas in terms of commercialization and adoption. But the trends are indisputable. Whoever works in these fields will take some risks and also gain huge benefits as first movers.

What are your thoughts on  China’s potential legalization of cryptocurrency, stablecoin, token trading in the future?

I think it is important to separate different categories. China has long shown support for blockchain infrastructure and for highly regulated digital systems, while remaining cautious about speculative retail cryptocurrency trading. So the more important question is not whether China will simply “legalize crypto trading” in the broadest sense. The more important question is how far China may go in supporting regulated stablecoins and tokenized financial systems.

Hong Kong’s progress is highly relevant here. Historically, Hong Kong has often served as a practical testing ground and policy window for new financial initiatives in the broader Chinese context. As Hong Kong continues to develop regulatory frameworks for stablecoins and digital assets, its experience could become an important reference point for how related policy discussions evolve more broadly in the future.

How can people reach you?

Red Date Technology Official Site: https://www.reddatetech.com/

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