Translation of PBOC Digital Currency Statement

On 20th Jan, the PBOC held a digital currency conference in Beijing. Digital currency experts from the PBOC, Citibank, and Deloitte discussed and exchanged ideas regarding the digital currency industry, the evolution of fiat digital currency, and government issued crypto-currency. The Governor of the PBOC, Zhou Xiaochuan, and Deputy Governor, FanYifei, attended the meeting. Additionally, representatives of important research institutions, financial institutions, and consulting agencies also attended the meeting.

The meeting points out that alongside the development of information technology, mobile internet, cloud computing, secure storage of terminals, and blockchain technology, global payments has changed significantly. The development of digital currency has brought great opportunities and challenges to the PBOC. We understand their importance, and established a research team in 2014. In 2015, we did substantial research on issuance, operational frameworks, key technical aspects, currency circulation, legal issues of digital currencies, and their impact on the traditional financial system. We also studied the relationship between fiat and privately issued digital currencies. Our research yielded significant results.

At the conference we concluded that in the new economic environment of China, discovering the potential of PBOC issued digital currencies is of great importance, and determined realistic steps that we should take. Issuing digital currencies instead of paper money could reduce the costs of issuance and circulation, increase the efficiency and transparency of money transfers, reduce the chances of money laundering and tax evasion, and increase the controllability of money supply by central bank to better support the development of our country. In the future, we see that the issuance of digital currencies and establishing circulation channels could further improve our country’s financial services industry, improve the payment and settlement system of our country, which would increase the quality and efficiency of our economic system.

We would like the digital currency research team to continue learning and researching the digital currency technology of foreign countries and push forward on laying the ground work for our own crypto-currency. One example is building protection mechanisms. The tactical aim for pbc is to develop the core technology of digital currencies, discover uses of digital currencies, and issue our (PBOC) own digital currency as soon as possible. Digital currency’s design should provide convenience, safety, be low cost, have high coverage, and seamlessly integrate with other platforms. This will increase the sustainability and effective use of digital currency.

The PBOC is pushing the development of digital currency by communicating with various organisations. These including international organisations, internet enterprises, financial institutions in China and traditional payment gateways in China. Participants of this project are working hard on it, and will continue to discuss and produce in depth research on related matters.