China Will Test The Digital Yuan On A Massive Food Delivery Platform

A food delivery platform with 435 million users will be the place where China will test the digital yuan initiative, reports show. As we can see from the latest cryptocurrencies news, the People’s Bank of China (PBoC) is planning to add the Tencent-backed food delivery giant named Meituan Dianping to the list of platforms which will test the real world use cases of the digital yuan.

For those of you who don’t know, Meituan Dianping is a Beijing-based food delivery platform that boasts with more than 435 million active users and billions of dollars in daily transactions. This basically creates a huge opportunity for adoption of the digital yuan, known as the Digital Currency Electronic Payment (DCEP).

Some sources close to Bloomberg said that Meituan had been in talks with China’s central bank – specifically its research arm named the Digital Currency Research Institute – about the use cases for its central bank digital currency (CBDC). However, both of the parties are yet to specify the details about their partnership.

We can also see that the Tencent backed video streaming platform Bilibili is also in discussions with the PBoC to test the digital yuan. Recently, the famous ride-hailing application DiDi also joined the project.

China will test the digital yuan on a platform with 435 million users, which is definitely something big in the news now. The PBoC already clarified that it does not have a specific launch date for this, but the research wing has been apparently increasing its efforts to explore the use cases of the CBDC in the real world.

In April, we saw reports in the blockchain news showing the potential launch of a wallet application across four cities in China such as Shenzhen, Chengdu, Suzhou and Xiongan for the initial test phase of the digital currency. The progress of the country towards a digital currency speaks a lot about its intention to align to the world of cryptocurrencies and make the most out of it.

China had apparently completed the backend development of its CBDC and the government apparently started drafting laws for the same in March 2020. It will be thrilling to see what all of this brings in the future.