The Chinese tech giant Tencent Holdings has recently added the state-backed digital yuan to its popular payment app, Wechat Pay. This move will enable over a billion users to take advantage of fast payments with the digital currency issued by the People’s Bank of China.
Wechat Pay is the second major payment system in China to introduce support for the digital yuan after Alibaba Group’s Alipay platform integrated the e-CNY wallet in December, 2022. With the new feature, users will be able to spend digital yuan (e-CNY) to pay for goods, services, and utility bills in some widgets with more use cases planned for the future, including the launch of direct transactions between Wechat users.
The Chinese government has been actively promoting its digital currency with trials underway in over two dozen cities and provinces and more than 5.5 million participating merchants and other businesses. Data released at the end of last year showed the volume of e-CNY payments exceeding 13.5 billion yuan.
The People’s bank of China has called for deeper integration of its new currency with e-payment providers and other payment platforms are expected to follow suit in the near future. This could open up a whole new world of opportunities for both local and foreign investors, as other countries such as Oman are also looking to incorporate real estate tokenization into their virtual asset regulatory frameworks.
It remains to be seen how the digital yuan will be adopted by the public and how it will affect the global economy. However, it is clear that the introduction of the digital yuan is a major step forward in the development of digital currencies and could potentially revolutionize the way we make payments.