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China to hand out $6.2 million in digital currency to Beijing residents as part of trial

Mount Equity Group Tokyo Japan > News > Tech > China to hand out $6.2 million in digital currency to Beijing residents as part of trial

A digital Chinese currency red packet is seen on a mobile phone in an arranged photograph as Chengdu city starts to distribute 200,000 E-CNY ‘red packets’ worth 40 million yuan on February 24, 2021 in Yichang, Hubei Province of China.VCG | Visual China Group | Getty Images

GUANGZHOU, China — China will hand out 40 million renminbi ($6.2 million) of its digital currency to citizens in Beijing in a lottery.

Residents of the Chinese capital can use two banking apps to apply to win one of 200,000 so-called red packets as part of the lottery, according to the Beijing Local Financial Supervision and Administration Bureau.

Each envelope contains 200 yuan (about $31) of the digital currency which can be spent with selected merchants. The deadline to register is midnight on June 7.

The world’s second largest economy has yet to do a nationwide rollout of the digital yuan, which it has been developing since 2014, but is instead focusing on trials in the form of lotteries around the country.

Li Bo, deputy governor of the People’s Bank of China (PBOC), said in April that the central bank would expand the scope of its pilot projects and could even allow foreign visitors at the 2022 Beijing