According to several press reports, Chinese e-commerce company JD.com Inc will become the country’s first virtual platform to accept China’s homegrown digital currency.
Bloomberg revealed that “JD Digits, the e-commerce giant’s fintech affiliate, will launch a pilot program this month, and customers will pay for certain items with digital yuan, it said on its official WeChat account. About 100,000 digital cash vouchers, worth 20 million yuan in total, will be issued to residents of Suzhou city in the eastern province of Jiangsu on Dec. 11.”
Reuters added “Suzhou’s scheme is the second such digital lottery, after the PBOC issued 10 million yuan worth of digital currency to 50,000 randomly selected consumers in the southern city of Shenzhen.”
These developments confirmed that central banks are also considering their own digital currencies. As a reminder, in early October, the Bank for International Settlements and seven central banks including the Federal Reserve, European Central Bank and the Bank of England published a report laying out some key requirements for central bank digital currencies, or CBDCs. According to China Briefing, it highlighted that “80 percent of the world’s central banks have already started to conceptualize and research the potential of Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC), 40 percent are building proofs-of-concept (PoC), and 10 percent are deploying pilot projects.”
China’s central bank is issuing and distributing the #DigitalYuan to commercial banks through Digital Currency Electronic Payment (DCEP)
How does China’s DCEP work? https://t.co/S28TxHxG6l#eBanking #legal #eWallet pic.twitter.com/Mh5BwcQdPQ
— China Briefing (@ChinaBriefing) December 4, 2020