How Blockchain Empowers Copyright Protection: Inside Tencent’s ZhiXinChain

In early 2019, Tencent partnered with China NetSec and Beiming Software to launch the ZhiXinChain trusted evidence blockchain platform, which has protected over 10 million original articles and facilitated more than 8 million takedown actions through the "One‑click Rights Protection" system of the Penguin Account content hub.

What is blockchain and what is ZhiXinChain?

Blockchain is a tamper‑resistant distributed ledger maintained by multiple parties, providing strong determinism for data integrity. In legal contexts, electronic evidence is often easy to alter, making dispute resolution difficult. ZhiXinChain leverages blockchain’s immutability to create trustworthy timestamps and hashes for digital content.

Why use blockchain for copyright protection?

Original creators on Tencent’s Penguin Account face a high infringement rate—over 50% of the roughly 300,000 daily articles are copied or plagiarized, causing massive losses. Traditional litigation is costly, slow, and electronic evidence is often rejected due to tampering risks. Blockchain can lower litigation costs and provide verifiable, immutable evidence, deterring infringement.

How does ZhiXinChain solve the problem?

The solution consists of four steps:

Determine ownership evidence : When an article is published, the Penguin Account system calls ZhiXinChain’s SDK to record the timestamp, author, content, and domain on‑chain, generating a unique hash witnessed by public‑authority nodes such as the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, copyright protection centers, and courts.

Secure infringement evidence : An infringement‑monitoring system scans the web, captures infringing pages, and uploads the evidence (who, where, when, what) to the blockchain.

Deterrence and enforcement : The immutable proof of original creation and infringement is presented to the infringer, who is asked to remove the content; otherwise, the case proceeds to online litigation.

Online litigation : If the infringer refuses, the evidence is submitted through the "Micro Court" platform for a fully online lawsuit, dramatically reducing time and cost.

Future outlook for blockchain in the copyright industry

Beyond protecting articles, the authors envision treating digital content as an asset tokenized on the blockchain. After government‑approved certification, each piece of content could issue a non‑fungible token (NFT) representing ownership, which can be traded, split, licensed, or used as collateral. Smart contracts would automate revenue sharing and licensing, turning creative works into tradable digital assets.

By converting content into immutable, tokenized assets, the platform aims to create a value network where creators, platforms, regulators, and financial institutions interact seamlessly, reducing infringement, enabling new business models, and fostering a more robust digital content ecosystem.