China’s Digital Currency Nears $250 Billion in Transactions: Central Bank Governor
Although the adoption and use of China’s central bank digital currency continues to grow, the digital yuan accounts for only 0.16% of China’s money supply.
The central bank governor of China has stated that in the past year and a half since the start of the pilot program, transactions worth nearly $250 billion have been conducted through the digital Yuan.
People’s Bank of China Governor Yi Gang said at a conference in Singapore on July 19 that the central bank’s digital currency had settled 1.8 trillion yuan by the end of June.
Yi said that since the digital yuan was first launched in January 2022, there have been around 950 million transactions involving around 120 million wallets. This equates to an average transaction value of $260.
MAS is honoured to have Dr Yi Gang, President of China Society for Finance and Banking as the speaker for the MAS Lecture 2023. Dr Yi spoke on “CBDC from China’s perspective”.
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— MAS (@MAS_sg) July 19, 2023
He claimed around $2.3 billion or $16.5 billion According to a July 19 Reuters report, the digital yuan was in circulation at the end of June, accounting for just 0.16% of China’s money supply.
China’s population of 1.4 billion people is not yet large enough to adopt the digital yuan. It was mainly used for domestic payments, with some trials in Hong Kong.
The South China Morning Post reported on July 18 that the Bank of China Hong Kong has started testing another cross-border payment system for Bank of China customers at select retail outlets in Hong Kong. According to the SCMP, the attempt was launched to promote the cross-border use of the digital yuan. It is also the third such trial the CBDC is conducting in Hong Kong.
Last year, BOCHK ran a trial program encouraging customers to create a BOC eCNY wallet and receive US$14 (100 yuan) to spend at Hong Kong supermarket chain U Select.
The central bank added smart contract functionality to the digital yuan in January. This was done to increase the number of possible uses.
This $250 billion digital yuan transaction is a 70% increase from the amount reported by the bank in August 2022.
This amount is well below the value processed by the largest public blockchains worldwide.
Various reports claim that Bitcoin (BTC) will process $8.2 trillion by 2022.
