WeChat Pay Interoperability is Another Key Breakthrough for Digital Yuan Pilot
Payment platform WeChat Pay began its own digital yuan journey, at the time when millions of Chinese citizens are getting their first taste of what life is like with a central bank digital currency (CBDC) – as citizens in some of the country's biggest cities began using a pilot version of a CBDC app.
WeChat Pay, operated by the tech giant Tencent, is one of China’s biggest digital pay platforms, and together with the Ant Group’s Alipay (part of the Alibaba business empire), represents a whopping 15% of the entire Chinese payments market.
Interoperability with the platform will be seen as a major step forward for Beijing – which many argue wants to cut into both the digital payments and the crypto markets with its new token.
Crypto has been shunted aside by two sweeping crackdowns, the most recent of which came in September last year. And unlike other CBDC projects, Beijing says its digital yuan initiative does not make use of blockchain technology.
The central People’s Bank of China (PBoC) has refused to commit itself to a full national rollout, but many of the most populous parts of the country already enjoy access to the digital yuan thanks to a fast-expanding pilot, and the bank is confident that the token will be ready to showcase to the world at the Winter Olympics, to be held in the capital early next month. Beijing’s Olympics sites are part of the pilot.
Per the media outlets Sina and Hexun, WeChat Pay users can access digital yuan functionality via the WeBank service by completing a quick verification process, and are now able to pay using the token by “scanning a digital yuan payment code on WeChat,” or by allowing merchants to scan a code using their own devices.
Although the PBoC is still keen to downplay the
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