Major Chinese Bank Disables Digital Yuan Wallet Right After Soft Launch

A Major Chinese bank disables the digital yuan wallet right after the soft launch garnered widespread attention as we are reading more in the upcoming altcoin news today.

The major Chinese bank opened up the new wallet service for the central bank of China digital currency for the public users but it immediately disabled it when it gained widespread attention. Around noon on Saturday, the users of the China Construction Bank which is one of the four state-owned commercial banks started noticing that the central bank digital currency wallet feature was only available inside the bank’s mobile app.

By searching for “digital currency” in Chinese, the users of the app were able to navigate to the digital yuan wallet service and to activate it by registering with a mobile phone number that is related to their bank accounts at CCB. It is unclear when the CCB opened up this service but the news of the feature quickly spread on Saturday among the Chinese cryptocurrency community. Some users even managed to make little amounts of transactions by linking their accounts with the wallet.

However, the banking giant has disabled the feature from public users. While searching for the same term inside CCB’s mobile app you can see the message that says:  This function is not yet officially available to the public. Please wait patiently.”

The short availability of the wallet shows the Chinese commercial bank was working to adopt the digital yuan initiative which is known as DCEP which is led by the People’s Bank of China. The interface of the wallet showed each user that it had activated the service that was assigned to a specific wallet ID which can be used to make transactions between a wallet and a user CCB account. The users could also send and receive digital yuan to each other by putting their unique wallet ID addresses or the associated mobile phone number.

With PBoC’s direction, the big four Chinese state-owned commercial banks have been working on their respective digital yuan wallets and running internal tests with the selected users and the merchants within the country. It still remains to be seen when these banks will open up their services to the public and whether the wallets that will enable applications that can use the digital currency. The PBoC is also working with DiDi Chuxing and some of the other internet-based services to apply digital yuan into more payment scenarios.