Internal pilots of China’s official cryptocurrency are in progress in multiple cities, and there are intentions to use the digital currency at Beijing’s Winter Olympic Games in 2022, Reuters reported.
The head of the People’s Bank of China’s (PBOC) monetary policy section, Sun Guofeng, said the experimental efforts are underway in Suzhou, Shenzhen, Chengdu and Xiongan, according to the report. Guofeng also said during a press conference that the PBOC would not make modifications to its monetary policy approach nor its flexible policy course.
Sun said per the report, “To cope with all sorts of uncertainties, the monetary policy requires greater certainty.”
He noted that the country has not used negative or zero interest rates or different kinds of unconventional approaches.
The news comes as Global Times recently reported that PBOC has said an experiment of a central bank digital currency (CBDC) has been geared toward small retail transactions — and has not encompassed large-volume transactions.
“At its current stage, the test’s primary goal is to ensure the digital currency’s operation runs smoothly and safely and to determine how DCEP [digital currency electronic payment] is distributed from the central bank to financial institutions,” Wang Peng, a Renmin University assistant professor, said in the Global Times report.
In other news, authorities arrested a 57-year-old man in Australia who allegedly took in $1.73 million in cryptocurrency as he purportedly impersonated another individual, The Sydney Morning Herald reported.
Officials claim that someone sent the man cryptocurrency transactions valued at $125,000 to $890,000 at different times. They then claim the man moved the cryptocurrency into his own account at a digital currency financial institution.
Two undercover detectives took the man into custody on Aug. 20 as he walked along the beach in Queensland. A police official told the paper that they started to look into the man back in June.
Beyond the police, a private investigator was also following the man. A businessperson, who thought he had been swindled by the man, had reached out to him earlier in 2020.
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