China’s central bank says it has completed ‘top-level’ design of digital currency
The People’s Bank of China (PBoC), the country’s central bank, has said that the “top-level” design of its digital currency has been completed.
The central bank announced the development in a new paper, saying that the “top-level design, standard formulation, functional research and development” has been completed, Chinese news site JRJ.com reported Friday.
The next steps are to follow the principles of stability, security and control, said Mu Changchun, the head of the digital currency research institute at the PBoC, according to another local report from Blockchain China.
The news appears to be the latest update from the PBoC regarding its digital yuan. Last week, the central bank said digital currency is “progressing smoothly.”
The launch date, however, still remains unknown. "We will continue to steadily advance the development of legal digital currencies” in 2020, the central bank said last week.
China's digital currency has been in the works since 2014. The much-anticipated digital yuan will be first distributed to commercial banks and then users and businesses can register digital wallets with these commercial banks, the PBoC stated recently.
The first cities to pilot digital currency will reportedly be Shenzhen and Suzhou. The PBOC is said to have partnered with seven state-owned commercial banks and telecoms - the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, Bank of China, China Construction Bank and the Agricultural Bank of China, China Telecom, China Mobile and China Unicom - to roll out the test.
