The People's Bank of China is planning to test the digital yuan by putting it to good use with the help of Meituan Dianping, a Beijing-based food delivery platform. It should be noted that this is a rather popular platform with 435 million active users, processing billions of dollars in transactions on a daily basis. Apparently, this opens big opportunities for mass introduction of the digital yuan, which is also known as the Digital Currency Electronic Payment (DCEP).
According to Bloomberg, they interviewed the Institute for Digital Currency Research, a department of the People's Bank of China, on the cases of CBDC application in China.
Supposedly, on top of Meituan Dianping, another Tencent company named Bilibili took part in the talks with the central bank. Bilibili is a very popular streaming service in China. Another participant is DiDi, a Chinese alternative to Uber.
At this point, it's hard to say when exactly the Chinese CBDC is going to be introduced as the official payment means in China. However, one thing is sure - China has been moving really fast towards achieving this ambitious goal. Apparently, if the tests are successful, the digital yuan may be introduced in the near future.
In April, there were rumors that the central bank launched an e-wallet for beta testing. It's interesting to note that the pandemic only sped up the testing process. In June 2020, the PBoC announced that they had finished working on the CBDC architecture. Also, a couple of months earlier the financial authorities started working on the legislative base for introducing the CBDC.
