These Chinese blockchain platforms are launching soon, here is why | Forbes

“Just a few months since China’s president Xi Jinping announced blockchain as one of the country’s technological priorities and advocated to “seize the opportunity”, there has been a lot of progress on the main blockchain initiatives and most of them will be in production very soon.

The ultimate goal is to enable and establish the People’s Bank of China (PBoC) and large Chinese enterprises like Tencent, Huawei, Baidu and Ant Financial as the world leaders in new-breed payments infrastructure with unique features, to undermine the significance of the U.S. dollar as a global trade currency with the launch of Digital Currency Electronic Payment (DCEP) and to establish Chinese blockchain technical standards which will help adopt and scale the technology faster.”

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China’s digital currency to start pilots | Ledger Insights

“China’s much anticipated Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) will start pilot testing this month, according to local outlet Caijing. The first firms involved are the four major state-owned banks, the three big telecoms companies and Huawei, which recently signed a cloud deal with the People’s Bank of China.

According to Fan Yifei, the deputy governor of the People’s Bank of China (PBoC), the currency has completed its top-level design, formulation, functional research and testing. The next step is to launch pilots, which are planned for Shenzhen and Suzhou.

The currency is referred to as the Digital Currency Electronic Payment (DCEP). That’s in part because it is a two-tier currency, where the first part involves the commercial banks converting some of their central bank deposits into digital currency. And the banks then distribute this digital currency to consumers. The process is intended to mirror the way physical cash is distributed.

The four state-owned banks involved are the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC), China Construction Bank, Agricultural Bank of China, and Bank of China. And the three telecoms companies are China Telecom, China Mobile, and China Unicom.”

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