China’s Giant Ride-Hailing Service Didi to Pilot the Central Bank’s Digital Yuan

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The Chinese government and the country’s central bank, the People’s Bank of China (PBoC), are currently in the midst of testing a digital yuan or central bank digital currency (CBDC). Now the Chinese ride-hailing corporation Didi Chuxing will be trialing the newly developed digital yuan in a “strategic partnership.”

Whether people want to believe it or not, the digital yuan is coming soon, and the PBoC has been steadily working on the project for years. Cryptocurrency enthusiasts have heard rumors about a digital yuan since 2014, but in 2020 that rumor is becoming more of a reality.

The last time news.Bitcoin.com reported on the subject, well known firms like McDonald’s, Starbucks, and Subway have been involved with testing the digital yuan. Additionally, those companies were joined by JD Supermarkets, Tencent, and Ant Financial. It was also rumored that Chinese government employees may soon be paid using the PBoC’s CBDC.

Now the ride-hailing giant Didi Chuxing has joined the PBoC and Chinese government officials behind the CBDC taskforce in a “strategic partnership.” The PBoC’s think tank will reportedly call the CBDC “DC/EP” (digital currency/electronic payment) and PBoC representatives have said that the DCEP experiment did very well during testing in Suzhou and the country’s Xiong’An shopping districts.

Didi Chuxing Technology Co, formerly named Didi Dache, is based in Beijing. In the recent DCEP partnership announcement, Didi refers to itself as “the world’s largest one-stop on-demand transportation platform.” The company with its founder Cheng Wei and 11,407 employees will be working directly with the DCEP project hands-on.

“Under PBOC’s overall DCEP strategy and operation timeline, Didi’s DCEP taskforce will design and implement pilot DCEP projects in accordance with rigorous safety, security, and governance standards,” Didi explained during the company’s latest announcement.

Didi Chuxing is vastly known as the “Uber of China,” and the company also offers ride hailing services in Latin America and Australia as well. The firm is valued at $56 billion to-date, and the company has roughly 550 million ride-hailing users across the globe.

The aim of Didi leveraging DCEP will help lay the foundations for the digital yuan. Despite recent testing with JD Supermarkets, Tencent, Ant Financial, Starbucks, Subway, and McDonald’s, the financial news outlet Bloomberg notes Didi Chuxing’s pilot “could be one of the first real-world applications of [DCEP].”

A representative from the PBoC said last April that the central bank hopes after the public beta testing completes, the bank can officially launch the digital yuan prior to the Beijing Winter Olympics scheduled for 2022. So far only a few other countries are in the midst of creating CBDCs, and just recently the U.S. has been discussing the “digital dollar.”

Sweden is currently working on an e-krona and Venezuela’s Socialist Party regime, run by Nicolas Maduro, minted the first nation-state issued CBDC called the “petro.” Despite the digital yuan being a rumor since 2014, it seems the Chinese central bank coin might just be the next nation-state cryptocurrency in line to launch.

What do you think about China’s DCEP working with Didi Chuxing? Let us know in the comments below.

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