China’s digital currency racks up ‘a couple of million’ yuan of payments per day at the Beijing Winter Olympics
- The Olympic trial is the first time visitors from overseas are free to use China’s digital currency via smartphones and wearable payment devices
- No breakdown available for use among international attendees, though it ‘seems all the foreign users are using hardware wallets’, central bank says
China’s sovereign digital currency, known as e-CNY, is catching international attention, with “a couple of million” yuan of payments being made each day in its latest trial during the Beijing Winter Olympics, a senior official with the People’s Bank of China (PBOC) has said.
China is leading the race among major economies to launch a digital currency and has rolled out pilot schemes in at least 10 cities across the country.
“I have a rough idea that [there were] several, or a couple of, million yuan of payments every day,” Mu Changchun, head of the PBOC’s digital currency research institute, told a webinar hosted by the Atlantic Council on Monday.
There was no breakdown of use among international attendees, though Mu said it “seems all the foreign users are using hardware wallets”, while Chinese were using software wallets.
Pilot programmes have been launched in Beijing, Shanghai, Hainan, Suzhou, Chengdu, Xiongan, Changsha, Dalian, Xian and Qingdao.
At the end of December, 261 million digital wallets had been opened and the digital yuan was being accepted by more than 8 million merchants. Transactions totalled 87.6 billion yuan.
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