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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Smartphones have basically replaced most of your access and credit cards, especially in China. You can simply open the designated app on your phone to make shopping payments, unlock doors, buy tickets for transportation, and so on. Physical identity cards have also been replaced by virtual e-ID cards on your phone. And Huawei Wallet’s auto card selection makes this process extremely easy on your phone. 

Traditionally, you would have had to manually select the appropriate card while making payments or buying a ticket for transportation. But Huawei Wallet’s auto card selection feature launched alongside the Mate 30 Pro can automatically identify the appropriate card according to the situation.

All you have to do is open the Huawei Wallet app and place your smartphone close to the scanner. The Wallet app will automatically select the appropriate card at the time of use. For example, if you are at a subway station, you can simply open the Huawei Wallet app and it will automatically select your subway card to purchase a ticket. Similarly, if you are at the supermarket about to make a payment, it can automatically select one of your credit cards (already added to the app) to make the payment. In short, you don’t have to individually select the card each time you use your phone for payment or authorization.

It’s a really cool feature especially if you live in a country like China where you can practically do anything using your smartphone. However, it remains to be seen if this feature is made available internationally.

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