China may be just a few steps away from officially unveiling its central bank-issued digital currency, DC/EP, commonly known as the digital yuan. According to a report from Xinhua, over 3000 ATMs are now updated with the function of converting China’s renminbi to digital yuan or do the opposite.
The report notes that the Beijing branch of the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC) activated the feature across its 3,000 ATMs in the Chinese capital city, which comes in line with the rumors the Chinese state is preparing the DC/EP rollout in time for the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics.
However, the functionality update of ICBC’s ATMs is in the test phase. The Agricultural Bank of China (ABC) joined the ICBC by offering the new functionality to 10 ATMs in the Wangfujing district, a major business and shopping area in Beijing.
The Agricultural Bank of China is no stranger to these types of tests, as the state-owned bank already rolled out digital yuan operations in Shenzhen. The bank, which is also one of the four largest state-owned banks in China, also pushed a $3 million worth of digital yuan to 100,000 local residents via a lottery mechanism.
The Chinese capital city, Beijing, also performed DC/EP lottery giveaway campaigns, with a total of 50 million digital yuan, worth around $8 million distributed across 200,000 local citizens.
Apart from Beijing and Shenzhen, China has conducted 10 digital yuan lottery campaigns across four more cities – Suzhou, Chengdu, Changsha, and Shanghai. The giveaway started in October 2020, with over 250 million digital yuan (worth around $40 million) airdropped to citizens.
Shanghai marks the biggest DC/EP lottery to date, with 350,000 potential lottery winners.
The preparations of the DC/EP for the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics may soon really kick into action, however, as Facebook’s Diem stablecoin project (ex-Libra) is rumored to be ready for deployment within six months.
Facebook started its stablecoin journey via the Libra Association and the coin was presented as a stablecoin, backed by a basket of currencies. The initial consortium gathered payment giants like PayPal and Visa, alongside Facebook’s ecosystem companies. However, Libra took a dive prior to even launching it, so Facebook decided to cut the multi-basket option and focus on creating a U.S. dollar-backed stablecoin, now called Diem. Also, Diem would coexist with a digital wallet app, called Novi.
Meanwhile, payment processors like Mastercard and Visa are also planning to enter the stablecoin bandwagon, as the companies would most probably partner with Coinbase and their USDC stablecoin and implement USDC into their payment networks.