TechFlow news, July 16 — At a press briefing on the progress of China's digital RMB development white paper, in response to a Financial Times journalist’s question regarding whether blockchain technology had been adopted into the digital RMB system, Mu Changchun, Director of the People's Bank of China (PBOC) Digital Currency Research Institute, stated that while blockchain offers advantages such as tamper-proof and traceable data, it suffers from limitations in performance and scalability, making it more suitable for low-concurrency, low-sensitivity scenarios like asset ownership verification, transaction transfers, and ledger reconciliation. At the transaction level of the digital RMB payment system, a centralized architecture has been adopted to support high concurrency and low latency, enabling the public to directly hold central bank liabilities. All cross-institutional transactions are settled through the central bank for value transfer. Meanwhile, a cryptographic string-based digital RMB representation has been designed, preserving key features such as security, double-spending prevention, and counterfeiting resistance. This design also allows integration of smart contracts related to monetary functions, fostering business model innovation and serving as a catalyst for digital economic activities.
At the issuance level of the digital RMB payment system, a unified distributed ledger has been built based on consortium blockchain technology. The central bank, acting as a trusted authority, uploads transaction data onto the chain via application programming interfaces (APIs), ensuring data authenticity and accuracy. Operating institutions can perform cross-institutional reconciliation, jointly maintain the ledger, and create multi-point backups.
