The People’s Bank of China has approved a pilot of a physical wallet card in digital yuan, reports news.Bitcoin.com, citing Tencent News. According to the source, the pilot is taking place in a coffee shop at a hospital in Shanghai. This wallet card looks like a regular plastic card. However, it has a small screen in the top right corner, which shows the card’s balance. Apart from that, individuals can use the card to make payments or receive transfers in digital yuan offline. The number of available offline payments is also reflected on the card.
China has been moving forward with the digital yuan project by running various test events. In December 2020, an e-commerce platform JD.com started accepted payments in the abovementioned Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC). Moreover, in the same month, the city of Suzhou ran a lottery to give away around $3 million in digital yuan.
The first public trial, however, took place in October 2020 in Shenzhen. Then, the city gave away CBDC worth 10 million yuan to 50,000 citizens. Moreover, news.Bitcoin.com says that pilots are also happening in other cities such as Xiongan and Chengdu, in preparation for the Winter Olympics scheduled for 2022.
China has worked on other blockchain-related initiatives. Those include the blockchain infrastructure project and the introduction of a major in blockchain engineering at the university in Chengdu.
There are no comments at the moment, do you want to add one?
Write a comment