China’s digital yuan will soon undergo real-world trials, with participation by top domestic tech companies in the country along with US enterprises such as Starbucks and McDondald’s.
As per Chinese publication Interchain Pulse, a promotion meeting was conducted on April 22 in Xiong’an, which is situation nearby Beijing.
Government organizations, merchants and digital currency developers have been invited to take part in the forthcoming trial.
The effort is under the framework of Xiong’an Smart City program. It started on September 25, 2019 as a consortium of companies, institutions offering higher education, academic institutions and tech firms.
Its board of directors includes enterprises such as Tencent, Huawei, Alibaba Group, Baidu and others.
Participants in the conference include numerous domestic government institutions such as Xiong’an division of the National Development and Reform Committee, which expertizes in fresh technologies and also several branches of the People’s Bank of China, which created the digital currency.
The suggested operators of the virtual currency were also took part in the event. Executives from Ant Financial, which owns Alipay, and Tencent, which owns WeChat, were part of the event.
The conference also saw participation from firms in the retail sector, particularly food and beverage, suggesting that these will be initial vendors to trial the digital yuan.
The list, strikingly includes Starbucks and McDonald’s, and also several catering firms, supermarkets, hotels, bookstores and baozi street food sellers.
Xinong’an is a totally new city that is currently being constructed, and it is expected to share some administrative activities of Beijing.
One of the enterprises involved in the trial is Zhonghai SPV, a specific purpose firm that is involved in the city’s construction.
Interchain Pulse, being the only non-retail firm, pondered that its staff will be the first group to begin using the digital currency.
This seems to affirm earlier speculation that the virtual currency would be trialed in Xiong’an.
The four cities that has been selected for piloting of the digital yuan are Shenzhen, Suzhou, Chengdu, and Xiong’an.
Disclosed info regarding the Suzhou testing indicates that it will have a distinct feature from the one in Xiong’an.
The digital yuan will be utilized to settle transport grants, with no transparency on how they will able to expend the funds.
The coronavirus pandemic has frozen the initiative. As the country limps to normalcy, the initiative seems to have been restored again.
