China’s digital yuan approaching $250 billion in transaction volume: Governor of the central bank

Nearly $250 billion of transactions have taken place using China’s digital yuan in the year and a half since the start of the trial, claims the governor of the country’s central bank.

On July 19, Governor of the People’s Bank of China Yi Gang speak at a conference in Singapore and said its central bank’s digital currency traded 1.8 trillion yuan at the end of June.

Yi added that there have been around 950 million transactions from around 120 million wallets since the launch of e-CNY lending early January 2022 to an average transaction amount of around $260.

MAS is honored to have Dr Yi Gang, President of the China Society for Finance and Banking as the speaker for the MAS Lecture 2023. Dr Yi spoke about “CBDC from a Chinese perspective”.

Find out more here: https://t.co/UbikjgQhRn pic.twitter.com/UuQwOQe8n0

— MAS (@MAS_sg) July 19, 2023

He claimed about $2.3 billion, or 16.5 billion e-CNY, in circulation at the end of June, which represented only 0.16% of China’s monetary supply, according to Reuters July 19. report.

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

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

The trial was launched in an effort to further promote the e-CNY cross-border app and is the third cross-border trial of the digital yuan in Hong Kong, according to SCMP.

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

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

$250 billion worth of e-CNY transactions is an increase of more than 70% from the amount the bank quoted in August 2022.

However, the numbers are still far from the amount of value processed by some of the world’s largest public blockchains.

Bitcoin (BTC), for example, processes $8.2 trillion in 2022, according to to various reports.

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