数字货币迎来新曙光：为什么数字人民币会永远改变货币流动的方式（英文）

Jason EkbergMichael HoA NEW DAWN FOR DIGITAL CURRENCY Why China’s eCNY will change the way money flows foreverAs a country that invented the bank note in the seventh century, China led the way money moves and is used in everyday life. And now it’s at it again. By introducing a central bank digital currency (CBDC), money is going fully digital, setting the standard for the way money flows globally.The currency— known as eCNY— will be recognized legal tender like the paper Yuan. While Chinese payment ecosystem is already high digitized, with 8TN RMB of bank notes still in circulation, the potential of going fully digital remains huge, bringing a new dawn for digital currency. And it’s coming faster than you might think. Testing of the currency, which began last year in four cities, was recently expanded by the PBOC to bigger cities including Beijing and Shanghai. A nationwide roll-out, meanwhile, is slated for next year’s Winter Olympics in Beijing.If they haven’t done so already, financial players need to sit up and take note. Significance of eCNY is not just the digital currency itself— payments are already largely digitized today. What’s more meaningful would be the introduction of a large-scale instant payment infrastructure, sponsored by the Chinese gov’t rather than private sector, with the adoption by some of the largest companies in the world alongside with a huge population that is increasingly internationally connected. And if there is an extension of eCNY into cross-border transaction, supported by liberalization policy, this will accelerate the RMB further as a true global trade current bringing both savings and efficiency to the cross-border flows.With currency issued and circulated by banks, and any conversion of paper RMB into digital RMB only permissible via them, they sit right at the heart of this new dawn.A New Dawn for Digital Currency© Oliver Wyman2WHAT ECNY ISeCNY will work like the paper Yuan. Currency will be a legal tender issued by central bank and circulated to the public via commercial banks. Payments can be made offline (based on smartphone NFC) as well as online. Payment clearing and settlement will be done through a centralized approach rather than a distributed approach, such as distributed ledger technology (DLT).The digital Yuan will also be ‘programmable’ and could be set to only be used for payments after ‘activation’, when certain pre-defined conditions are met. This would provide additional levers for more flexible fiscal and monetary policies, as well as monitoring and controls, such as cross border.WHAT ECNY ISN’TAn effort by PBOC to redefine the global payments market structure. The short-term focus is the domestic market, bringing greater stabilities given the concentration of digital payment volumes and the “risk of failure” created. Only in time will eCNY go international and in all likelihood focus on key China-led initiatives. It is not a means to control or stymie innovation— in fact, it is meant to fo