Chinese e-commerce company Jingdong commonly known as JD.com has made history becoming the first online platform to accept China’s digital currency. The company said it’s very much proud of becoming first Chinese virtue platform to accept China’s homegrown digital currency.
Going forward, the company’s fintech unit JD Digits will be accepting digital yuan as a means of payment for some products available on its online mall.
Citing a post from the company’s official WeChat account, acceptance of the digital yuan by the company’s fintech unit will be as part of an experimental giveaway of digital yuan to citizens of Suzhou, near Shanghai.
In the Suzhou initiative, People’s Bank of China (PBOC) and the municipal government will jointly issue 200 digital yuan ‘red envelopes’ to 100,000 consumers chosen through a lottery.
China’s digital yuan is ranked as among the most advanced ‘central bank digital currency’ initiatives across the world. These initiatives from central Banks have been facing stiff competition from private digital currencies such as Facebook Inc. (FB) Libra and Bitcoin.
Last month, PBOC Governor Yi Gang announced that so far over 2 billion yuan had already been spent using China’s digital currency in up to 4 million separate transactions.
Earlier the PBOC had issued 10 million yuan worth of digital currency to 50,000 consumers selected randomly in the southern city of Shenzhen.
