Thread by @ChorzempaMartin

Huge news: pboc white paper on china’s #cbdc just out! Expect a big thread after I’ve had enough coffee to read and process it…
pbc.gov.cn/WZWSREL2dvdXRv…

1/biggest deal in here is confirmation that foreigners can use the digital RMB in CN. Not sure whether they can leave the country with eCNY still in wallet...

Also confirmed major eCNY use at Beijing Olympics with digital wallets, wearable payments tools built into outfits, etc.

2/PBOC reveals stark decline of cash & cards for payments: bank cards used in only 7% of transactions, cash 23%, and mobile payments a whopping 66% (full stats only in Mandarin version)

YET: physical cash stays. Promises never to eliminate it, as long as there is demand

3/After flip flopping, PBOC confirms eCNY will be direct central bank liability, contradicting former PBOC Gov Zhou Xiaochuan who said it would not be. This is huge, b/c making direct digital gov liability avail to public is big step with risks of deposit flight to CBDC, etc.

4/Promise to lower payment costs, but fee structure is left open. PBOC won't charge the banks/Ali/Tencent for the infrastructure, and they can't charge consumers to buy/sell eCNY, but digital wallets presumably can still charge merchants some fee to accept payments.

5/International: they say domestic...for now. Will expand, but promise to protect monetary sovereignty of other countries (read, no forced RMB'ization) and follow their rules on capital controls, data privacy, etc. They clearly expect big influence on cross-CBDC pymnt in future

6/Who's included? All the big banks are both operators and helping R&D, while Tencent's WeBank and Ali's MyBank are only listed as R&D rartners. Still, expect main way eCNY is used in future to be as option in Alipay/WeChat, but one the gov pushes them towards

7/How big are the pilots? They've handled 70m transactions totaling 35b RMB, with 10 million users. They are also using smart contracts already, including as expiring red envelopes to spur consumption (have to be spent or lost)

8/Technical details? PBOC will control the "whole life cycle" of eCNY, managing the chain of transactions that forms the ledger. Transaction records will be hashed so that only PBOC has the whole list--banks and wallets on system can only see pieces