Ecommerce Giant JD.com Accepts China’s Digital Yuan as Payments on Singles Day Shopping Fest

JD.com, a top electronic site in China, was accepting China’s new Digital Renminbi for payments on its e-commerce platform during Singles Day – the world’s biggest shopping event - for the first time.

Although the Singles Day event normally happens – from November 1 to November 11, every year, this is the first time in which JD.com was allowing consumers to make payments with China’s digital currency.

The e-commerce giant disclosed that it was taking the Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) as part of a wider trial exercise through its collaboration with China Construction Bank.

A spokesperson from JD.com talked about the development and said that more than 100,000 customers have paid using China’s digital yuan on the JD shopping app during the Singles Day promotional period, which first started on the evening of October 31 and ended yesterday Thursday, November 11.

“100,000 people had used e-CNY on JD.com’s app during the Singles Day promotion period as of today,” the spokesperson narrated and further added: “We will continue to work with related parties to explore the application.”  

Customers also received 15 yuan ($2.34) when they download China’s digital currency app via JD’s download link.

Last year, Singles Day across all platforms made a merchandise value of 840 billion yuan ($31.3 billion) and therefore made bigger sales than Black Friday and Cyber Monday combined.

This year, some of that yuan was placed on China’s central bank digital currency.

Singles Day, which sees China’s e-commerce platforms offer heavy discounts and make billions of dollars of sales, has demonstrated to be a good test to examine how the national digital currency performs in a large-scale situation.

Digital Yuan Expands 

Although China’s new Digital Currency Electronic Payment (DCEP) has not officially rolled out nationwide, JD’s move to accept it during the biggest shopping event in the world shows the People's Bank of China’s push to trial it in a large-scale environment.

Established in 1998, JD.com is a major ecommerce firm in China, considered as the biggest online retailer in the country and China’s largest internet company by revenue.

As reported by Blockchain.News in September 2020, JD.com became the first e-commerce platform to accept China’s e-CNY and in April this year, the firm announced that it paid some of its employees using the digital currency.

According to JD.com, since December 11 2020 to June 18 this year, 450,000 customers have used China’s digital currency payments on the JD app and spent more than 100 million yuan ($15.6 million).

 Meanwhile, China’s central bank has been gradually rolling out its digital currency across individual provinces. Earlier this month, a top official from the People’s Bank of China announced that more than 140 million people have opened wallets for the digital yuan, which has been used for transactions that totaled 62 billion yuan ($9.7 billion).