The people’s bank of China has said that it is progressing smoothly with its development of a government backed digital currency. The bank issued this statement during a conference in Beijing that was held on Jan 2-3 according to an official news report.
According to the report, China’s central bank digital currency (CBDC) has been five years in the making and was officially piloted in December 2019. Once officially out the Chinese CBDC will be controlled by the PBoC as a form of digital tender and will be fully backed by the reserves deposited by commercial institutions into the main bank. China’s main bank had touched on the planned CBDC’s progress in a conference devoted to studying and implementing the spirit” of the Fourth Plenary Session of the 19th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, held in Oct. 2019, and December’s annual Central Economic Work Conference.
The conference highlighted the work that the PBoC had done in 2019 with speeches given by the body’s president and the Chinese communist party secretary Guo Shuqing. The conference outlined the bank’s key strategies for advancing socialism with “Chinese characteristics”. The Bank’s 2020 remit under aegis of the party central committee and state council will involve making “countercyclical adjustments” to monetary policy, tackling financial risks, and pursuing an ongoing liberalization of the economy.
The impact of China’s CBDC and Blockchain strategy is yet to be seen. Analysts are however closely monitoring Beijing for clues of its evolving stance in terms of interoperability, censorship, international strategy and regulation. China’s pursuit of a central bank digital currency has been touted by some as a response to Facebook’s Libra digital currency which is set to be launched later this year. It is not clear how decentralized this Chinese currency will be according to Ethereum co-founder Joe Lubin. Will it mean censorship-resistant, autonomous, and anonymous? It remains to be seen
