Some recent digital yuan statistics show China’s central bank digital currency (CBDC) usage is increasingly for corporate and government transactions. Based on a small set of figures in a single region, average top up sizes for individuals was the equivalent of $13, compared to $9550 for corporates and governments. And there were more enterprise transactions than individual topups.
The statistics were limited to transactions processed in the telecoms and media sector during January to July this year in the Jiangsu province.
The figures show the sector processed 2,700 topup payments totalling 257,800 yuan, the equivalent of $13 per personal topup. As that’s the recharge figure, the transactions amount will be far smaller.
In contrast, the statistic for enterprise and government payments was exponentially larger at 200 million yuan for 2,887 settlements or $9,550 per transaction.
Given this is ‘industry’ usage, the topups are likely for work usage, which might explain the low number of recharges. The statistics might not be representative of the rest of the country, particularly as Jiangsu claims to account for 72% of the country’s transactions. We believe that proportion relates to transaction values rather than the number of transactions.
As previously reported, the telecoms firms – including state owned China Telecom, China Mobile, China Unicom – are rolling out “super SIM cards” for the digital RMB, which connect mobile phones to digital yuan wallets and support offline CBDC usage.
Meanwhile, we’ve previously reported on the trend towards commercial use cases. That’s based on the most recent full statistics and the roll out of applications for high value transactions such as settlements for commodities trading.
