China’s digital yuan nears $250B transaction volume: central bank governor

The governor of the country’s central bank has claimed that nearly $250 billion worth of transactions have taken place using China’s digital yuan in the year and a half since the start of the pilot project.

Yi Gang, governor of the People’s Bank of China, on July 19 spoke and said at a conference in Singapore that its central bank digital currency had handled 1.8 trillion yuan in transactions by the end of June.

Yi said that since the initial January 2022 loan distribution of e-CNY, there have been approximately 950 million transactions from approximately 120 million wallets, with an average transaction amount of approximately $260.

MAS is honored to have Dr. Yi Gang, President of the China Society for Finance and Banking, as the speaker of the MAS Lecture 2023. Dr. Yi spoke on “CBDC from China’s Perspective”.

Learn more here: pic.twitter.com/UuQwOQe8n0

— MAS (@MAS_sg) 19 July 2023

He claimed that according to Reuters on July 19, there was about $2.3 billion or 16.5 billion e-CNY in circulation at the end of June, representing only 0.16% of China’s monetary supply. reports,

Adoption of the digital yuan is still minimal relative to China’s 1.4 billion-strong population, so far, e-CNY was mostly used for domestic retail payments except for a few trials in Hong Kong.

On July 18, the South China Morning Post (SCMP) informed of Bank of China Hong Kong began testing another cross-border payment scheme for Bank of China customers at select retail stores in Hong Kong.

According to the SCMP, the trial was launched to further promote cross-border applications of e-CNY and is the third cross-border trial of the digital yuan in Hong Kong.

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In a trial last year, BOCHK launched a program that encouraged customers to set up a BOC e-CNY wallet to receive $14 (100 yuan) to use at Hong Kong supermarket chain Yu Select.

In January, the central bank integrated smart contract functionality into the digital yuan to expand its use cases.

The $250 billion in e-CNY transactions is an increase of more than 70% from the number cited by the bank in August 2022.

However, this amount is still a far cry from the amount of value processed by some of the world’s largest public blockchains.

For example, bitcoin (BTC) processed $8.2 trillion in 2022, According for various reports.

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