A large bank tacitly opened a wallet service for China's central bank digital currency to public users, but quickly shut it down after the feature garnered widespread public attention.
The new feature fully operational for a short time
Around noon on Saturday, local time, users of China Construction Bank (CCB), one of the four large state-owned commercial banks, began to notice that a central bank digital currency wallet function was available within the mobile app. of the bank.
By searching for "digital currency" in Chinese, app users could access the yuan digital wallet service and make it operational by registering with a mobile number associated with their bank accounts with the CCB.
It is unclear when the CCB opened the service, but news of the new feature on the app quickly spread among users and was also bounced by Chinese crypto media.
Some users have even managed to transact small amounts of money by linking their CCB bank accounts to the digital wallet. However, the banking giant has now disabled the feature which is no longer available to public users.
Searching for the same term within the CCB's mobile app now leads to a message stating: “This feature is not yet officially available to the public. Wait patiently. "
However, the fact that the wallet has been available, albeit for a short period of time, shows that the Chinese commercial bank is working on the digital yuan adoption project, also known as DCEP, led by the People's Bank of China (PBoC).
The opening of services to the public is even closer
The wallet interface that was available briefly showed that each user who activated the service was assigned a specific wallet ID, which could be used to transact between the wallet and the users' CCB bank accounts.
Furthermore, users can also exchange digital yuan with each other by entering their unique wallet ID addresses or mobile phone number associated with their bank accounts. Under the leadership of the PBoC, China's four large state-owned commercial banks developed their respective digital yuan wallets and performed internal tests with select users and merchants in the country.
At this point, it remains to be seen when these banks will officially open services to the public and whether the wallets will be enabled on multiple applications capable of using digital currency such as Bitcoin system. The PBoC is also working with DiDi Chuxing and other Internet services to apply the digital yuan in different payment scenarios.
