 "Illustration: Binay Sinha")
China launched its digital currency, the e-yuan, at the Beijing Winter Olympics in February this year, after running a series of pilot projects in major cities. The e-yuan operates through digital wallets, much like the Chinese digital payment platforms of Alipay and WeChat, but it is issued and managed by the People’s Bank of China (PBOC), the central bank.
It is reported that currently there may be over 140 million e-yuan wallets in use by individuals and 10 million by businesses. The transaction value achieved is about 10 per cent of the total, compared to the 90 per cent still conducted through Alipay and WeChat. There is interoperability among the platforms. Alipay handles 544,000 transactions per second (TPS) against a mere
