The Chinese government is launching another digital yuan lottery to stimulate its ongoing digital currency trials, this time in the capital of Beijing. The Beijing Local Financial Supervision and Administration officially announced Tuesday that the government will distribute 40 million digital yuan ($6.2 million) to Beijing residents as part of a new digital currency pilot. Starting in June, the program features “red envelopes” — a traditional way of gifting money — with each providing a free online wallet containing 200 digital yuan ($31). These red envelopes will be distributed to 200,000 lottery winners, who must download an application to use …
China’s central bank digital currency, or CBDC, will provide backup for major retail payment services like AliPay and WeChat Pay as its key objective, according to an official at the People’s Bank of China. Mu Changchun, head of the People’s Bank of China’s digital currency research institute, claimed that China’s digital yuan is needed to ensure financial stability in case “something happens” to AliPay or WeChat Pay, the South China Morning Post reports. Speaking at an online panel discussion on Thursday, Mu stated that Alibaba’s Alipay and Tencent’s WeChat Pay account for 98% of the mobile payment market in China, …
The Chinese national blockchain project, the Blockchain Service Network, is planning to pilot integration with global central bank digital currencies. According to a Jan. 15 blog post, the BSN is looking to build a universal digital payment network, or UDPN, based on CBDCs of various countries as part of its 2021 roadmap. Currently at the design stage, the beta version of UDPN is expected to launch in the second half of 2021. The BSN plans to complete the UDPN development in five years. With the UDPN, BSN aims to enable a standardized digital currency transfer method and payment procedure. The …
The People’s Bank of China (PBoC) is planning to add the Tencent-backed food delivery giant Meituan Dianping to its list of platforms that will test real-world use cases of the digital yuan. Meituan Dianping is a Beijing-based food delivery platform that currently boasts of more than 435 million active users and billions of dollars of daily transactions. This creates a huge opportunity for the mass adoption of the digital yuan, which is also referred to as the Digital Currency Electronic Payment or DCEP. Unnamed sources told Bloomberg that Meituan had been in talks with the research arm of China’s central …
A former official of the People’s Bank of China (PBOC), the country’s central bank, has expressed disappointment that China’s digital yuan is seeing little use. Xie Ping, a former PBOC research director and current finance professor at Tsinghua University, made critical public comments about China’s central bank digital currency (CBDC) at a recent university conference, according to a Dec. 28 Caixin report. Xie noted that cumulative digital yuan transactions had only crossed $14 billion (100 billion yuan) in October, two years after launch. “The results are not ideal,” he said, adding that “usage has been low, highly inactive.” Despite the …