China’s Central Bank Digital Currency Research Unit Signs Deal with Huawei

The Chinese central bank, People’s Bank of China’s (PBoC) Digital Currency Research Institute, has signed an agreement with multinational telecommunications giant Huawei. 

Fan Yifei, the PBoC deputy governor signed the fintech research cooperation agreement between Huawei and PBoC’s Digital Currency Research Institute in Shenzhen at Huawei’s headquarters.  

Huawei said that the “strategic cooperation” agreement is for FinTech research. Fan also praised the firm’s achievement in developing distributed databases and computing chips.  

Ren Zhengfei, Huawei’s CEO recently publicly stated its support for China on the issuance of a digital currency to rival Facebook’s stablecoin Libra. He said: “China can also issue such currency by itself. Why wait for others to issue it? 

The PBoC started its Digital Currency Research Institute in January 2017, focusing on blockchain and FinTech research. Mu Changchun, appointed to head the research said that the design of the national digital currency would be similar to Libra and would be accessible across major payment platforms including WeChat and Alipay.  

Huawei has been active in the blockchain space, having revealed its Hyperledger blockchain offering in April of this year. This announcement also appears to be the first publicly announced deal by China’s central bank with a well-known company.  

President Xi Jinping also called on his country to accelerate the adoption of blockchain technology recently.

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