Bitcoin Deposit and Withdrawal Contract (CBDC) Wallets in China Rely on Age-Old Tradition to Promote Adoption

The digital yuan wallet app incorporates a common method of giving money as a gift in China, which has been modernized to work with digital currency.

To entice more people to use the digital yuan central bank digital currency (CBDC) wallet app, the Chinese government added the ability to send money in digital "red packets."

According to a report in the South China Morning Post on December 26th, the new feature went live over the weekend, roughly a month before the start of the Chinese New Year on January 22nd.

In China, "red packets" are known as hongbao and are used to present monetary gifts during festive occasions like the Chinese New Year. Popular regional services like WeChat Pay and Alipay have begun offering digital versions of traditional red envelopes in response to the growing popularity of cashless transactions in the region.

Reports suggest that unlike WeChat Pay and Alipay, the e-CNY app only allows one person to receive a red packet at a time, while a "lucky draw" for multiple recipients can be organized using the same pool of money.

Users can select a packet cover featuring either new year's or birthday greetings, or the phrase "prosperous China," to express their hopes for the coming year.

On October 10th, digital yuan transactions surpassed $14 billion (100 billion yuan), representing a 14% increase from the $12 billion (87.6 billion yuan) reported by the People's Bank of China at the end of 2021.

The e-CNY trials will be extended to the cities of Jinan, Nanning, Fangchenggang, and Kunming, according to a report in the Chinese Workers' Daily newspaper dated December 18. In September, the trials were extended to four additional provinces, including the most populous, Guangdong.

In spite of the government's hasty expansion of the trials, only 261 million people as of January 2022 were using an e-CNY wallet.

WeChat Pay and Alipay could be used by the Chinese government to promote the use of the digital yuan.

Both WeChat and Alipay accept e-CNY, with WeChat having 1.3 million active users per month as of the September quarter of 2018, and Alipay having over 1 billion active users per year as of its fiscal year ending August 17, 2020.

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