China’s Meituan to Allow CBDC Payments

China’s food delivery service Meituan has become the latest tech firm to let customers use central bank digital currency (CBDC) payments.

As CoinTelegraph reported Friday (Jan. 28), users can link their Meituan app to a digital wallet to pay for daily services like cabs, hotel reservations and meals in restaurant. The company saw 660 million transacting customers last year, giving the Chinese government yet another chance to test its digital currency on a wider scale.

The past few months have seen tech giants like WeChat and JD.com allow their customers to make payments with the digital yuan, or e-CNY.

Read more: China’s Digital Yuan Captures $8.3B in Payments Over 6 Months

China has spent the last two years testing the digital yuan, offering it first to government employees before expanding it to the populations of entire cities. In 2020, China launched a CBDC trial in cities that included Suzhou, Shenzhen, Chengdu and Xiong’an.

The People’s Bank of China (PBOC), the country’s central bank, has since begun allowing the general public in 10 Chinese cities to download a pilot version of the digital yuan app.

Prior to allowing the general public to download the digital yuan app, the central bank’s initial pilots were open to users selected by lottery in certain cities for designated time periods.

Earlier this month, the PBOC announced that digital yuan trials captured $8.3 billion of the country’s payment markets over the last six months and $13.6 billion in the last two years.

And the number of e-CNY users in the country rose at a faster pace than the transaction volume, with 261 million users by the end of 2021, a 240.13 million increase from the end of June.

Read more: China to Use Olympics to Test Digital Yuan

The country will also begin testing the digital yuan at next month’s Winter Olympics in Beijing, offering the e-CNY to athletes and spectators alike.

All of this puts China at the front of the pack in the race among the world’s larger economies to launch a CDBC. Many countries have begun developing a digital currency, but just a few have reached the pilot phase, including France, South Korea and Switzerland. The U.S., meanwhile, is still studying the pros and cons of developing its own digital currency.