• As of the end of June, 1.8 trillion yuan had been transacted.
• There have been around 950 million transactions using about 120 million wallets.

The governor of China’s central bank has said that, in the 1.5 years since the launch of the digital yuan pilot program, about $250 billion has been transacted using the digital currency.

At a conference in Singapore on July 19, People’s Bank of China (PBoC) governor Yi Gang said that as of the end of June, 1.8 trillion yuan had been transacted using the country’s central bank digital currency. Since the e-CNY’s first release in January 2022, Yi said, there have been around 950 million transactions using about 120 million wallets, with an average transaction value of about $260.

He estimated that just $2.3 billion, or 16.5 billion e-CNY, was in circulation as of the end of June, according to Reuters. This amounts to about 0.16 percent of China’s monetary supply. Even though China has a population of over 1.4 billion people, the digital yuan has only seen limited acceptance outside of domestic retail payments and a few experimental uses in Hong Kong.

The South China Morning Post (SCMP) announced on July 18 that the Bank of China (Hong Kong) has begun testing a new cross-border payment mechanism at a few local Hong Kong retailers exclusively for Bank of China clients.

Long Way to Go

This is the third cross-border experiment of the digital yuan in Hong Kong, and it was launched to encourage the use of e-CNY in international transactions.

Last year, the BOCHK tested a program that offered clients $14 (100 yuan) in exchange for creating a BOC e-CNY wallet and using it at the U Select supermarket chain in Hong Kong. The capabilities of the digital yuan were enhanced in January when the smart contract feature was added by the central bank.

The bank’s estimate of $250 billion in e-CNY transactions represents a growth of more than 70 percent from the figure provided in August 2022. However, this sum is still far smaller than the daily value handled by a few of the world’s biggest public blockchains.

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