The central bank of China has shared the results of their pilot project for the digital yuan, that was conducted within three major cities: Shenzhen, Suzhou, and Xiong’an.
The deputy chairman of the People’s Bank, Fan Yifei, attended the Sibos 2020 conference virtually and unveiled that the bank has opened 8,859 corporate digital wallets, as well as 113,300 consumer digital wallets in the framework of its tests.
Over the course of the testing, these wallets processed 1,1 billion yuan ($162 million) in 3.1 million digital transactions. They were run between April and August this year. Yifei highlighted that these results make the digital yuan the most widely applied central bank virtual currency put in a market setting.
The digital currency was used in a total of 6,700 various use cases. It was linked to facial recognition, scanning of barcodes, tap and go methods etc. It was also implemented across different industries like transport, utility billing, administrative services, retail, tourism, donations, and gifts.
The development of the digital yuan is a longstanding initiative started by the Chinese Government back in 2014. Back then, the country set a research institute on digital currency that is aimed at developing technologies revolving around the cryptocurrency field.
The goal of the work of the institute is to bring up to date the payment system of China, bypass traditional global trade networks, and project geopolitical power.
