China continues to widen the central bank digital currency gap with its major peers, as mainland platforms and users further adoption across salary payments, online purchases and more.
Chinese e-commerce giant JD.com was the latest major corporation to showcase its digital yuan capabilities as it said over the weekend that it had begun paying some staff in digital yuan.
It first began its partnership with the People’s Bank of China in September last year and has since provided technology and service support for digital yuan pilots across Suzhou, Beijing and Chengdu.
Use Case Growth
JD.com joins a flurry of other commercial powerhouses in furthering the adoption and capabilities of the digital yuan across various use cases. In addition to basic functions like payment acceptance – as is the case for purchases through video streamer Bilibili or ride-hailing app Didi – tech players are increasingly adding to the digital yuan’s versatility.
Huawei, for example, has rolled out a mobile-based wallet that allows users to make instant digital yuan purchases offline.
More recently, Jack Ma’s Ant Group also said it would join the PBoC on working to build out the digital yuan infrastructure.
Digital Yuan Momentum
The PBoC's digital plans have recently gained increasing attention, most notably from foreign authorities like the U.S. which is reportedly boosting scrutiny of the e-yuan and the Bank of Japan which publicly came out say that it posed no threat to the dollar.
A PBoC official subsequently responded by claiming that the digital yuan had no such ambition to topple the greenback.
A separate PBoC official added that the digital yuan will co-exist with other payment platforms like Ant’s Alipay or Tencent’s WeChat Pay and act as a backup.
