China Launches A CDEP Test App For Its National Digital Currency

Tweets coming in from China’s residents within the last few hours indicate that the country’s central bank, the People’s Bank of China (PBoC), has launched a Digital Currency Electronic Payment (DCEP) app for its highly anticipated national digital currency.

DCEP Test App Available For Download

According to information from sources who have either personally used the application or familiar with the matter, the CDEP app can be used to receive and also make payments as well as perform other basic functions expected of a digital currency wallet.

According to local news outlets, the People’s Bank of China (PBoC) starts pilots in four States owned banks including China Telecom, China Mobile as well as China Unicom. Others, however, are said to be in line for implementation after a successful period of testing. The DCEP app is said to work offline as sending and receiving of digital Yuan can take place between exchanging parties when one or even both are offline.

China Moves A Step Closer To Digital Yuan

This news takes China a step closer to realizing its dreams of launching a national digital currency earlier than any other country with a major economy as well as stimulating its financial stability. The country first pronounced the ambition when popular social media platform, Facebook, announced its intentions of launching a cryptocurrency, or at best, a digital currency that aimed to bank the unbanked around the world. Libra, as the project was known, would make its currency available worldwide to about 2.8 billion global subscribers and would also make sending and receiving easy through the use of WhatsApp.

China became one of the first big economies to kick against Facebook’s idea and immediately moved to launch a similar cryptocurrency to cushion the effect. Since then, China has been taking a step closer to making this a reality.

DCEP Similar To Physical Yuan

Chairman of China International Economic Exchange Center, Huang Qifan, States that the country has been working on a DCEP for at least half a decade now and that he’s certain that the innovation can now be introduced into the country’s financial ecosystem.

According to Qifan,

“DCEP CAN ACHIEVE REAL-TIME COLLECTION OF DATA RELATED TO MONEY CREATION, BOOKKEEPING, ETC, PROVIDING USEFUL REFERENCE FOR THE PROVISION OF MONEY AND THE IMPLEMENTATION OF MONETARY POLICIES”

China’s central bank also stated in a separate report that DCEP is not a currency for speculation. The report maintained that the national digital currency is a digital form of physical yuan meant to be used in similar ways and accepted by all merchants operating within the country.