These Chinese Blockchain Platforms Are Launching Soon, Here Is Why: Digital Currency Electronic Payment (DCEP) is in The Advanced Testing Phase

• These Chinese Blockchain Platforms Are Launching Soon, Here Is Why: Digital Currency Electronic Payment (DCEP) is in The Advanced Testing Phase
  by Biser Dimitrov, https://www.forbes.com/
  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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  Digital Currency Electronic Payment (DCEP) is in the advanced testing phase
  Just this week we saw the first mobile wallets that are enabled to work with DCEP as it is already in the advanced testing phase in four Tier 1 and Tier 2 cities: Shenzhen, Xiong’an, Chengdu and Suzhou. The functionality is also interesting as it will have the possibility to send and receive offline payments. DCEP, which is the name of China’s official central bank digital currency (CBDC), is not using a typical blockchain but more of a distributed ledger technology (DLT) style protocol. The digital yuan is currently being tested at Agricultural Bank of China (ABC)’s wallet and it is safe to assume that all of the top four China banks (Bank of China, the China Construction Bank and the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China) are also having access to it. The way that DCEP is designed is that each of the large commercial banks have accounts at PBoC for the digital yuan on one side and are working directly with Alibaba BABA (AliPay) and Tencent (WeChat Pay) as large payment providers with access to retail users.
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  It is interesting to note that the China’s digital yuan will have a couple of significant differences from its legacy twin. The main one is that storing digital yuan will not generate interest, hence it is to be used only for in/out payments. The second one is the potential speed and reach of the DCEP; in case of emergency and for tax reasons PBoC will have instant access to people’s wallets, even in rural areas.

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