Chinese e-commerce company Jingdong (JD.com) has become the country’s first virtual platform to accept China’s own virtual currency called Digital yuan as a payment option. This was contained in a statement released by the company today.

The company’s fintech unit, called JD Digits will now accept the digital yuan as payment for some products on its online mall, as part of a pilot experimental giveaway of digital yuan to citizens of Suzhou, near Shanghai, as monitored on the company’s official WeChat account today.

The development of China’s digital currency is seen in some quarters as a move to break the US dollar’s stranglehold on the global financial system and gain a greater foothold on consumers spending patterns.

China began the rollout of the digital yuan earlier this year. Pilot schemes have been undertaken in four Chinese cities, where transactions totaling more than 2 billion yuan ($300 million) have already taken place. If the program is expanded nationwide, as expected, China would become the most powerful economy to have a national digital currency.

It is believed that the Digital yuan has the potential to make transactions more convenient and secure. It could also help those who don’t have access to bank accounts and other traditional financial services to buy needed items.

China’s digital yuan is not a cryptocurrency like bitcoin. Instead, it is issued and controlled by the People’s Bank of China, the country’s central bank. The homegrown digital currency is among the most advanced “central bank digital currency” in the world, as proactive governments continually muster initiatives to globally respond to threats from private digital currencies like bitcoin and Facebook’s Libra.

Under the current pilot program, the municipal government in collaboration with the People’s Bank of China (PBOC) will issue 200 digital yuan so-called “red envelopes” to 100,000 consumers to be selected via a transparent random selection scheme.

The Suzhou lottery initiative is coming on the heels of the second digital lottery undertaken by the PBOC after it issued a cumulative total of 10 million digital yuan to 50,000 randomly selected consumers in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen.

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(source)

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Huawei announced the Mate 40 series in China today. A few days back, Huawei’s CEO hinted at a special feature coming to Chinese variants. Today, at the launch event, Richard Yu of Huawei announced that Mate 40 series will be the first smartphone to have a hardware wallet for China’s digital currency(DCEP).

Accordingly, the Huawei Mate 40 series supports(via Decrypt) an in-built hardware wallet for China’s DC/EP(Digital RMB). Here DC is Digital Currency, and EP is Electronic Payment. Besides, China’s Central Bank Digital Currency, the digital Yuan is reportedly under development since 2014. Further, Huawei CEO said that the device will offer hardware-level security along with anonymous protection, and dual-offline transactions.

Simply put, users can use the device as a digital wallet and shop at multiple outlets in the country. Interestingly, they can also initiate transactions when they are offline. As per Huawei’s Offical Weibo account, the Huawei Wallet is supported at 16 million+ PoS(Point of Sales) terminals, and 130+ banks(English translated). However, it is unclear if users can swap their bank savings to this wallet. That said, the announcement comes at a time when the Chinese Government is pushing digital currency to the public. And conducting trials of the same.

Besides, Huawei has also been actively involving with the government to promote digital currency in China. Earlier this year, it signed an agreement with Govt. of Nanshan District of Shenzhen, Southeast China. This was to strengthen the country’s Digital Currency economy. And collaborate with the People’s Bank of China to begin the testing of its own virtual currency in Shenzhen.

China’s rigorous push for DCEP

Reports say that Shenzhen‘s Luohu District stimulated around 10 million yuan ($1.5 million) to public citizens to pilot test the digital currency and promote DCEP. Accordingly, 50,000 initial recipients got the DCEP through a lottery system. And made to use it across 3,389 merchants including restaurants, gas stations, metro, and more.

As per the system, there will be a DCEP wallet developed by commercial banks like China’s Central Bank, People’s Bank of China. Users can avail these lotteries by downloading the DCEP wallet of the respective banks. Before this, nearly 2 million people signed up for the Digital yuan Experiment. And 50,000 of them reportedly got a 200 yuan gift envelope.

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