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The Rise and Fall
April 2020 Finance Story
Were you watching? Did you see the news in April 2020, China launched its cryptocurrency, the digital yuan, to see how it would behave within China? The formal designation for sovereigns offering a cryptocurrency is a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC). CBDCs like the digital yuan are government-issued, blockchain-based versions of a country’s national currency. Like most conventional cryptocurrencies, CBDCs would provide greater transparency into how people spend in the aggregate, as the currency’s blockchain would act as a permanent, immutable ledger of all transactions. Here is the link for the research on this topic: https://blog.chainalysis.com/reports/china-report-preview-digital-yuan
China is rolling out the digital yuan through state-owned banks and digital payment apps like WeChat Pay and AliPay, which are much more widely used in China than their American or European counterparts. Digital yuan trials are ongoing, with many pointing to Beijing’s 2022 Winter Olympics as the government’s occasion to unveil its new CBDC to the world, as it plans to issue the digital yuan to visiting athletes. As of July 2021, trial users have created more than 20 million digital yuan wallets and executed over $5 billion worth of transactions with the new CBDC.
