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Shanghai, China\u2019s most crowded city, is looking for ways to use a metaverse in public services over the next five years.<\/p>\n
Shanghai Municipal Commission of Economy and Information Technology\u2019s five-year development plan for the electronic information industry listed four frontiers for exploration, and one of them is the metaverse.<\/p>\n
According to a CNBC\u00a0report<\/a>, the paper called for promoting the metaverse\u2019s use in public services, business offices, social leisure, industrial manufacturing, production safety and electronic games.\u00a0The commission plans to encourage further study and development of underlying technologies, such as sensors, real-time interactions and blockchain technology.<\/p>\n China\u2019s interest in new technology has been unwavering in recent years, and its efforts to establish a central bank digital currency<\/a> (CBDC) and its use of digital biometric hardware wallets<\/a>\u00a0for the virtual yuan have cemented it as a leader in the issuance of a CBDC.<\/p>\n In March, China\u2019s State Council released its five-year development plan that included many of these same fronts for exploration. As reported by Cointelegraph,\u00a0the term \u201cblockchain\u201d was used for the first time in China\u2019s 14th five-year plan<\/a>, a document that outlines the country\u2019s economic goals for the next five years, which runs from 2021 through 2025.<\/p>\n Related:\u00a0<\/em><\/strong>Chinese companies embark on a metaverse trademark race<\/em><\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n The metaverse has become an area of interest for many major companies in recent months. In October,\u00a0Facebook changed its name to Meta<\/a> in order to bank on the popularity of the term metaverse.<\/p>\n Despite the People\u2019s Bank of China\u2019s warning on metaverse and nonfungible tokens<\/a>\u00a0in November, over 1,000 Chinese businesses have filed tens of thousands of trademark applications that reference the term. More than 1,360 Chinese businesses have\u00a0applied<\/a> for 8,534 trademarks, according to the South China Morning Post.<\/p>\n Chinese companies are in the process of\u00a0developing<\/a> metaverse technologies, with Baidu, Tencent and Alibaba among those aggressively working on related projects. Last week,\u00a0Baidu debuted its XiRang metaverse app<\/a>, which will fully launch in six years.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n