Thank you to Timmy Shen for interviewing me for this “THE BLOCK” article on the digital yuan.
The headline about “digital yuan hype fading” is partially true. The launch at the Olympics did garner a lot of attention, even with Covid, Now, the People’s Bank of China has settled into the hard work phase!
It is true that the digital yuan is now being used for some large-scale “institutional” payments, but this shouldn’t be a surprise. Many seem stuck in thinking that the digital yuan will only be used to buy coffee.
In Cashless, I explain how digital yuan will be used for large-scale trade payments. In October of 2023, the digital yuan was used to settle a roughly USD 90 million payment for oil. As I wrote in “Cashless, the digital yuan was designed to pay for things far bigger than coffee.
The full article can be found here
My thoughts on the topic!
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Richard Turrin, a Shanghai-based fintech consultant, said there’s less news about e-CNY compared to two years ago because the PBOC is now doing the “hard or dirty work,” which is “fundamentally less newsworthy” than the launch of pilots.
“It takes a lot more to build this ubiquitous national digital currency than it does to launch a cryptocurrency, which you turn on overnight, because you have to make sure it works first time and every time for every user,” Turrin added.
