China’s digital yuan is now live on app stores🇨🇳📱; Pine Labs banks $20M from State Bank of India🇮🇳; Billion-dollar DEX on Cosmos 🤯

Good Morning FinTech, January 5

Good day Everyone,

And happy Wednesday! I hope the first week of 2022 is treating you well. If not, I know how to make it better - let’s dive into 3 great FinTech stories I’ve prepared for you today:

China’s digital yuan is now live on app stores🇨🇳📱

The launch 👀 China's Central Bank has finally launched its pilot CBDC wallet app for digital yan aka e-CNY on the Android and Apple app stores as it gears up for the upcoming Winter Olympics.

The digital yuan is a so-called Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDCs) — a kind of cryptocurrency issued and controlled by the government of a nation-state.

Long hours ⏰ In development since 2014, the Digital Yuan wallet has undergone extensive field testing across the country, with the pilot run handling transactions worth $5.34B as of June 2021. The Central Bank states that the CBDC had been used for over 70M payments across more than 1.3M scenarios.

The live pilot 👉 The wallet app has so far been available on an invitation-only basis, but its arrival on the app stores signals the Central Bank's determination to seed the technology across the population ahead of the showcase Winter Olympic games in Shanghai next month when it will compete for traction against the dominant commercial payment apps from Ant Group and Tencent.

Individual users in China may now hence download a version of the app to try out “personal wallet opening and management” and “e-CNY exchange and circulation services,” according to a tweet from BlockBeats, a local news outlet, which also featured screenshots of the app.

Yet, it must be noted that to download the trial app and activate the wallet, users must be physically located in one of 11 locations: Shenzhen, Suzhou, Xiong’an, Chengdu, Shanghai, Hainan, Changsha, Xi’an, Qingdao, Dalian, and the Winter Olympics area.