China is undertaking a huge experiment that could transform the future of money. Through ambitious pilot testing in major cities, the Chinese Communist Party is racing to develop centralized digital currency, also known as digital yuan.
If expanded as planned, China would become the most powerful economy to offer a national digital currency, long before the digital euro proposed by the European Central Bank. With more than 750 million people in China purchasing online goods last year, analysts at Goldman Sachs estimate digital yuan could be used by 1 billion people in the next decade. Yet the development of hyper-centralized digital yuan would also create the world’s largest repository of financial transactions data, allowing the authoritarian CCP unprecedented access to ramp up surveillance of ordinary citizens.
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If expanded as planned, China would become the most powerful economy to offer a national digital currency, long before the digital euro proposed by the European Central Bank. With more than 750 million people in China purchasing online goods last year, analysts at Goldman Sachs estimate digital yuan could be used by 1 billion people in the next decade. Yet the development of hyper-centralized digital yuan would also create the world’s largest repository of financial transactions data, allowing the authoritarian CCP unprecedented access to ramp up surveillance of ordinary citizens.
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