The Chinese government’s beloved project of central bank digital currency (CBDC) has not sparked much enthusiasm in the citizens of Hong Kong. In the first four days since the “digital yuan” (also known as “e-CNY”) hard wallets became accessible to the islanders, only 625 Hongkongers had actually obtained them. As reported by the local newspaper on Feb. 28, the city of Shenzhen installed the machines, dispensing the hard wallets for digital yuan, the first of a kind in the whole country. Due to the city’s unique location as a gateway from Hong Kong to mainland China, the machines were programmed …

The idea of lifting the cryptocurrency ban has started floating in China as a former central bank official has called the country to review its stringent crypto restrictions. Huang Yiping, a former member of the monetary policy committee at the People’s Bank of China (PBoC), believes that the Chinese government should think again about whether the ban on cryptocurrency trading is sustainable in the long run. Huang voiced his concerns about the future of fintech in China in a speech in December, according to a transcript published by the local financial website Sina Finance on Jan. 29. The former official …

A former official of the People’s Bank of China (PBOC), the country’s central bank, has expressed disappointment that China’s digital yuan is seeing little use. Xie Ping, a former PBOC research director and current finance professor at Tsinghua University, made critical public comments about China’s central bank digital currency (CBDC) at a recent university conference, according to a Dec. 28 Caixin report. Xie noted that cumulative digital yuan transactions had only crossed $14 billion (100 billion yuan) in October, two years after launch. “The results are not ideal,” he said, adding that “usage has been low, highly inactive.” Despite the …

The Chinese city of Wuhan had reportedly shelved its aspirational nonfungible tokens (NFTs) plans amid growing regulatory uncertainty around the crypto and Web3 technologies in the country. Wuhan first announced its plans to support metaverse and NFTs in the aftermath of the coronavirus breakout as a measure to boost its economy ruined by the pandemic. The city was the epicenter of the COVID-19 breakout. The Wuhan government’s draft industrial plan for the city’s metaverse economy development included a line about NFTs. However, that part has now been omitted from the latest version, according to a report by South China Morning …

Researchers from a Chinese state-run think tank have floated the idea of an Asia-wide digital currency with the aim to reduce its reliance on a United States dollar-based economy. The views of researchers Liu Dongmin, Song Shuang, and Zhou Xuezhi from a unit of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) were published in an issue of the “World Affairs journal” posted online in late September, who said the establishment of an “Asian yuan” token would lower Asia’s reliance on the U.S. dollar. Much like similar existing and trialed Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs), the researchers said distributed ledger technology …

China’s central bank digital currency (CBDC) project has reached the mark of 100.04 billion yuan (close to $14 billion) of made transactions during its pilot phase. It makes digital yuan, the e-CNY, the most widely adopted CBDC in the world. As the Bank of China reported in the post on its official WeChat page on Oct. 10, by the end of the summer, the number of transactions made in 15 provinces within the CBDC pilot framework had reached 360 million. More than 5.6 million merchant stores already support the digital yuan as a legal tender, according to the post. The …

Chinese tech conglomerate Tencent has filed for a virtual concerts patent with the Chinese National Intellectual Property Administration (CNIPA) according to business data-tracker Qichacha. The application comes as Chinese companies race to secure Metaverse trademarks. Even though the People’s Bank of China (PBoC) took a strong stance against the Metaverse and nonfungible tokens (NFTs) in November, stating that it would track them with Anti-Money Laundering tools, more than a thousand Chinese companies have submitted over 16,000 metaverse-related trademark applications according to a report from Chinese news outlet, The Paper. Despite the warnings, the Chinese multinational technology and video-game colossus Tencent, …

The 2022 Winter Olympics, officially called the XXIV Olympic Winter Games, kicked off on Feb. 4 in Beijing with crypto being a major part of the event, partly because of the Chinese government’s digital currency ambitions. The cryptocurrency community hasn’t had strong ties to the Olympics over the last few years. The last major headline-grabbing interaction was when the Dogecoin (DOGE) community helped fund the Jamaican bobsled team in 2014 so they could attend the event in Sochi. The 2022 Winter Olympics, however, are making history due to the presence of nonfungible tokens (NFTs), Bitcoin- (BTC)-supported athletes, the launch of …

Experts say that China’s corner of the Metaverse is likely to evolve very differently to other international markets and that decentralized infrastructure may not be part of the game plan. The Sino Metaverse seems likely to repeat what happened with the web. When the internet first went mainstream in the 1990s, many people theorized that it might accelerate democracy in China. NewZoo’s 2021 trend report “Intro to the Metaverse” claimed that the Communist nation’s distaste for decentralization won’t necessarily deter it from participating in the Metaverse, but the experience may be very different, similar to the way the internet looks …

The use of cryptocurrencies to evade international sanctions from various international governmental organizations like the United Nations (UN), the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, among others, has been a concern for regulators ever since the creation of cryptocurrencies. The rapidly increasing adoption of digital currencies in the last two years makes this discussion more important than ever, especially with the advent of central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) like the digital yuan. In an interview on Nov.17, United States Deputy Treasury Secretary Wally Adeyemo said that the efficacy of U.S. sanctions would not be undermined by central bank …

OmiseGo has moved to stamp out rumors about the company possibly being impacted by China’s crackdown on ICOs. Through a Reddit post OmiseGo reassured everyone that China’s ban on ICOs will not necessarily harm the OMG network. On the post, OMG said China’s prohibition only refers to decentralized currencies, meaning it doesn’t necessarily affect the OMG network: “The OMG network is currency-agnostic and the open-source, white-label digital wallet framework we provide will allow financial service companies to select what services they provide their end-users, in compliance with the regulations they must follow”. OmiseGoing With such transparency and constant updates from …