On Wednesday, China’s central bank Governor Yi Gang gave an update on the latest digital yuan statistics after nearly a year of a relative blackout in statistics. By the end of June, the central bank digital currency (CBDC) pilot program had reached a total of 950 million transactions, up from 360 million in August 2022.

According to Mr. Yi, the cumulative value of eCNY transactions has now reached 1.8 trillion yuan (about $250 billion), an 18-fold increase from 100.04 billion ($13.9 billion) last August. . However, previous updates showed declines in the average transaction value, while the latest figures point to a massive rise to 1,895 yuan ($265), compared with 278 renminbi ($39) in 2022.

This substantial increase could signal an increase in corporate use cases, which we predicted last month when the Shanghai Clearing House announced it would support the digital yuan for wholesale commodity transactions. Although China has recently been working on various retail experiments, it has also increased wholesale uses to encourage more adoption and improve its statistics.

One thing that needs to be clarified is the number of CBDC wallets, which Mr. Yi reported to be more than 120 million. Previous reports had spoken of close to 300 million wallets, but it is possible that the governor was talking about active rather than open digital yuan wallets.

Another caveat is the relatively weak increase in digital renminbi in circulation. China’s Ministry of Commerce recently said that the total stock of eCNY stood at 13.61 billion yuan ($1.90 billion) by the end of 2022, but according to Reuters, as of the end of June, that number had only increased to 16.5 billion ($2.3 billion).

Cross-border uses with Singapore

During his speech in Singapore, the governor also said that he is open to linking the digital yuan for real-time transfers to Singapore dollar bank accounts. The city-state has other non-digital currency real-time settlement cross-border links with Thailand and India.