China Released Digital Yuan Wallet Despite Ongoing Bitcoin Crackdown

China released digital yuan wallet despite the ongoing Bitcoin crackdown in the country so let’s read more today in our latest cryptocurrency news.

China is in the middle of piloting a new e-CNY network and it is the first public release of it. At the start of 2021, China dominated the BTC mining industry with more than half of the new BTC were minted there and according to the stats compiled by the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance, the Chinese BTC mining had all but disappeared despite the ban. Even as China cracked down on crypto, it scaled up the plans for a central bank digital currency as an electronic version of the yuan that will make the bills and the coins obsolete so it started piloting the project in regions across the country.

The government made its e-CNY wallet publicly available for download via China’s Apple and Android App stores. The citizens in cities covered by the pilot like Shenzhen and Shanghai can register the trial version. China released a digital yuan wallet app that will be available to use for foreigners as well during the Winter Olympics events. Most countries are researching a central bank digital currency backed by distributed ledgers like blockchains as a way to go cashless and to enhance security while lowering the costs and increasing the speed of the payments. Two countries already rolled out CBDCs: The Bahamas, and Nigeria.

With a population of 1.4 billion, China represents a bigger test for state-issued digital currencies. The head of the Digital currency Research institute claimed that over 140 million citizens opened accounts by last October. AliPay on the other hand counts over 90% of the country’s residents as users. As the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace noted, the digital yuan could allow china to break Ant Group and Tencent’s stronghold on payments infrastructure so the government also said it wants to use the e-CNY network to increase the financial surveillance. For those that are skeptical of the Chinese government’s intentions, Carnegie said:

“Its success could weaken dominant incumbent payment platforms, enabling policymakers to bring these platforms in closer alignment with Chinese financial regulators’ objectives, such as cracking down on unauthorized cross-border capital flows and bitcoin trading.”

To incentivize the citizens to use the network, governemnt officials were running the digital yuan lotteries which distributed 30 million yuan to 150,000 residents of Shenzhen and Suzhou.