digital yuan
Chinese authorities have announced that the 2022 Winter Olympics participants, visitors and organizers can spend more than $300,000 in Chinese digital yuan per day.
Mu Changchun, general director of the Digital Currency Research Institute at the People’s Bank of China, said that China’s central bank digital currency is used to make 2 million yuan ($316,000) or more in payments every day. Archyde.com also reported on Tuesday that the official presented the data during a webinar hosted by the Atlantic Council.
“I have a rough idea of having several digital payments or a few million digital yuan each day, but I don’t have exact numbers yet,” Mo said, adding that there was no breakdown yet of the number of transactions made by Chinese citizens and foreign attendees. .
But the official still notes that foreign users tend to use hardware wallets more, referring to e-CNY payment cards, which look like credit cards without the regular chip and magnetic stripe.
“Local users mainly use wallet software,” Mo added.
The aforementioned amount is a significant contribution to the launch of the PBOC digital currency in China, given that the total volume of digital transactions in yuan reached $13 billion by November 2021 since the PBoC was first launched in April 2020.
The availability of the digital yuan has raised some concerns regarding cybersecurity and privacy from the global community, with some US senators reportedly viewing the digital yuan as a “tremendous security threat to individual users”. In late 2021, the head of British intelligence, Jeremy Fleming, argued that using a central bank digital currency might allow Beijing to monitor users and control global transactions despite presenting a great opportunity to democratize payment systems.