The Chinese government and the country’s central bank, the
People’s Bank of China (PBoC), are currently in the midst of testing a
digital yuan or central bank digital currency (CBDC). Now the Chinese
ride-hailing corporation Didi Chuxing will be trialing the newly
developed digital yuan in a “strategic partnership.”
Whether people want to believe it or not, the digital yuan is coming
soon, and the PBoC has been steadily working on the project for years.
Cryptocurrency enthusiasts have heard rumors about a digital yuan since
2014, but in 2020 that rumor is becoming more of a reality.
The last time news.Bitcoin.com reported
on the subject, well known firms like McDonald’s, Starbucks, and Subway
have been involved with testing the digital yuan. Additionally, those
companies were joined by JD Supermarkets, Tencent, and Ant Financial. It
was also rumored that Chinese government employees may soon be paid using the PBoC’s CBDC.
Now
the ride-hailing giant Didi Chuxing has joined the PBoC and Chinese
government officials behind the CBDC taskforce in a “strategic
partnership.” The PBoC’s think tank will reportedly call the CBDC
“DC/EP” (digital currency/electronic payment) and PBoC representatives
have said that the DCEP experiment did very well during testing in
Suzhou and the country’s Xiong’An shopping districts.
Chuxing Technology Co, formerly named Didi Dache, is based in Beijing.
In the recent DCEP partnership announcement, Didi refers to itself as
“the world’s largest one-stop on-demand transportation platform.” The
company with its founder Cheng Wei and 11,407 employees will be working
directly with the DCEP project hands-on.
“Under PBOC’s overall
DCEP strategy and operation timeline, Didi’s DCEP taskforce will design
and implement pilot DCEP projects in accordance with rigorous safety,
security, and governance standards,” Didi explained during the company’s latest announcement.
Didi
Chuxing is vastly known as the “Uber of China,” and the company also
offers ride hailing services in Latin America and Australia as well. The
firm is valued at $56 billion to-date, and the company has roughly 550
million ride-hailing users across the globe.
The aim of Didi
leveraging DCEP will help lay the foundations for the digital yuan.
Despite recent testing with JD Supermarkets, Tencent, Ant Financial,
Starbucks, Subway, and McDonald’s, the financial news outlet Bloomberg
notes Didi Chuxing’s pilot “could be one of the first real-world
applications of [DCEP].”
A representative from the PBoC said last April that the central bank hopes after the public beta testing completes,
the bank can officially launch the digital yuan prior to the Beijing
Winter Olympics scheduled for 2022. So far only a few other countries
are in the midst of creating CBDCs, and just recently the U.S. has been
discussing the “digital dollar.”
Sweden is currently working on an e-krona and Venezuela’s Socialist Party regime, run by Nicolas Maduro, minted the first nation-state issued CBDC called the “petro.”
Despite the digital yuan being a rumor since 2014, it seems the Chinese
central bank coin might just be the next nation-state cryptocurrency in
line to launch.
source link : https://news.bitcoin.com/chinas-giant-ride-hailing-service-didi-to-pilot-the-central-banks-digital-yuan/
