The digital yuan was designed primarily for the public and merchants, not to replace SWIFT or weaponize the currency. According to Forkast, this was stated by the former head of the People’s Bank of China, Zhou Xiaochuan.

The expert emphasized e-CNY not necessarily suitable for cross-border payments. It may be adapted for these purposes in the future, but in this case the CBDC will still focus on retail applications.

“The world should avoid thinking in a Cold War paradigm that would harm everyone,” Zhou said.

China has been testing the digital yuan for three years. At the end of 2021, transaction volume with e-CNY reached 87.57 billion yuan (~$13.68 billion), 261 million unique digital wallets were registered.

It joined the “bridge” project for national digital currencies launched by the Central Banks of China and regulators of the UAE, Hong Kong and Thailand in February 2021.

In April 2022, the People’s Bank of China expanded its e-CNY testing program to 23 cities.

Recall that Bank of America envisaged the preservation of the hegemony of the dollar thanks to the release of the CBDC.

Previously FRB Boston and MYTH submitted a whitepaper and open source code for the digital dollar as part of the first phase of examining its potential debut.