“This is about more than just money,” said Yaya Fanusie, a fellow at the Center on Economic and Financial Power, a think tank, and an author of a recent paper on the Chinese currency. Its early moves could signal where the rest of the world goes with digital currencies. Yet no major power is as far along as China. digital currency was “absolutely worth looking at” because it “could result in faster, safer and cheaper payments.” At a New York Times event last week, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen indicated that might change when she said a U.S. In contrast, the United States has moved slowly and done just basic research. The countries include Sweden, which is conducting real-world trials of a digital krona, and the Bahamas, which has made a digital currency, the Sand Dollar, available to all citizens. Over the last 12 months, more than 60 countries have experimented with national digital currencies, up from just over 40 a year earlier, according to the Bank for International Settlements. These currencies can enable direct handouts of money that expire if not used by a particular date and can make it easier for governments to track financial transactions to stamp out tax evasion and crack down on dissidents. Many countries have taken action as cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, which has recently soared in value, have become more popular.īut while Bitcoin was designed to be decentralized so that no company or government could control it, digital currencies created by central banks give governments more of a financial grip. The effort is one of several by central banks around the world to try new forms of digital money that can move faster and give even the most disadvantaged people access to online financial tools. The country’s central bank, which began testing eCNY last year in four cities, recently expanded those trials to bigger cities such as Beijing and Shanghai, according to government presentations. “The journey of how you pay, it’s very similar” to that of other Chinese payments apps, Huang said of the eCNY experience, though she added that it was not quite as smooth.Ĭhina has charged ahead with a bold effort to remake the way that government-backed money works, rolling out its own digital currency with different qualities than cash or digital deposits. Then she pulled up a QR code for the digital currency from inside her bank app, which the store scanned for payment. To spend it, she went to a convenience store near her office and picked out some nuts and yogurt. On similar lines, sometime back, Indonesia’s central bank also announced plans to launch a digital currency to ‘fight’ private cryptocurrencies.Annabelle Huang recently won a government lottery to try China’s latest economics experiment: a national digital currency.Īfter joining the lottery through the social media app WeChat, Huang, 28, a business strategist in Shenzhen, received a digital envelope with 200 electronic Chinese yuan, or eCNY, worth around $30. Which in turn, creates a level playing field for new payment providers, as per the professor. Instead, to “provide a payment infrastructure that then provides interoperability for any payment provider, who wants to use that payment network.” Therefore, going forward, Prasad explained that the idea to set up a CBDC should not be to directly compete with these payment providers. “I think there is a concern that these two major payment providers have dominated the payment space…now control massive flows of data.” Meanwhile, McKinsey also reported that e-CNY saw moderate adoption as WeChat Pay and Alipay remain popular options. “PBOC is trying to create a digital currency that competes with these payment providers, for the use case for a CBDC I think, it’s actually pretty weak in China.” When a comparable volume for the digital yuan was achieved in 18 months. It is also noteworthy that Alibaba is a huge platform that attracted a sales figure close to $85 billion in just around 11 days. And also to make sure that the payment space is not dominated by two payment providers.”Īs per a recent WSJ report, e-CNY is not offered on platforms by e-commerce giant Alibaba. “The People’s Bank of China wants to make sure that a digital version of the yuan is relevant, in terms of making sure that central bank money remains tractable at the retail level.
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