The latest reports indicate that more Chinese cities will get added to the country’s digital yuan pilot – with a rollout nearing reality.
Based on the Workers’ Daily newspaper, the city of Jinan, Shandong Province, will be included in the pilot area. Also joining this pilot will be Fangchenggang and Nanning in the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, together with Yunnan Province’s Kunming. Interestingly, the Xishuangbanna Dai Autonomous Prefecture will also get included.
The latter is an autonomous prefecture for ethnic Dai people, located in the south of Yunnan Province.
This latest move sees the digital yuan pilot move into somewhat unfamiliar technology. While the first batch of pilot cities consisted of IT and financial powerhouses in the East of the Asian nation, the likes of Beijing and Shanghai, Yunnan’s economy is a lot more traditional. The province’s largest industries include agricultural companies, tobacco producers, tourism operators, and mining firms.
Guangxi borders Vietnam and is renowned for its mineral reserves and rice production activities. In the meantime, Jinan is a major rail hub and an up-and-coming industrial center in Shandong. The province is another part of China that is popular with tourists because of its natural beauty.
Introductory giveaways have been launched on some e-commerce platforms. Some lucky draw participants in the new test cities will win more than $11 worth of digital yuan tokens when they download wallets on their mobile devices.
International Stage For The Digital Yuan
Late in November, political leaders hinted that Hong Kong and Mainland China would soon co-launch the digital CNY’s first Cross-border pilot project. Earlier in December, the p e-commerce platform Taobao and the payments giant Alipay confirmed that they would integrate digital CNY components.
The organizers of 2023’s Asian Games – to be hosted in Hangzhou from September to October 2023 – appear to be getting ready to showcase the token to a bigger international audience. Coaches, athletes, and media representatives attending the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics were the first global participants to experience the digital yuan firsthand earlier in 2022.
Buy Bitcoin Now‘Hard’ digital yuan wallets were distributed at that event, and the Olympic village’s outlets were all adapted to just accept payments made in e-CNY or using Visa cards. A similar occurrence is already on the cards for Hangzhou in 2023 – where international spectators might be invited for the first time since the COVID-19 pandemic.
Hangzhou 2023 organizers in the past week unleashed a series of “hard” (offline) wristband-style wallets that comprise the games’ mascots.
The coin is also referred to as the DC/EP or DCEP in China.
