China’s digital yuan is shifting from pilot projects to a policy tool as Beijing adds interest to balances, tightens oversight, and promotes its use in cross-border payments, driving more than $52bn in e-CNY flows over the mBridge platform in 2025.
According to the Atlantic Council, China’s CBDC, the e-CNY, had been used in roughly 3.4 billion transactions worth 16.7 trillion yuan ($2.3 trillion) by late November 2025, more than 8 times the cumulative value seen in 2023, and now serves as both a domestic payments option and a foundation for alternative settlement systems.
Programmable, Interest-Paying e-CNY Becomes a Foundation in China’s Payments Infrastructure
Beijing has been guiding people toward the e-CNY by pushing more public money through it, from tax rebates and subsidies to medical insurance payouts and other government transfers. The currency’s programmable design allows officials to set conditions on how and where those funds can be used, which can streamline spending but also raises fresh questions about privacy and the scope of state oversight.
The People’s Bank of China (PBOC) has also started offering interest on e-CNY balances, turning it from just a payment method into something similar to a savings account, making China the first major economy to use an interest-earning central bank digital currency widely.
Officials also view the e-CNY as a state-backed alternative to stablecoins, borrowing their speed and real-time settlement while keeping issuance and data inside the regulated system rather than crypto markets.
Beijing Aligns e-CNY Oversight With Its Geopolitical View on Currency Power
The Beijing-based E-CNY Operations and Management Center now oversees domestic systems, working alongside an International Operations Center in Shanghai launched in September 2025, forming what PBOC Governor Pan Gongsheng has called a “two-winged” structure for onshore and cross-border use, with staff growing from a few dozen to several hundred.
PBOC Governor Pan Gongsheng has linked the e-CNY to China’s vision of a more “multipolar” monetary order, arguing that reliance on a single dominant currency leaves the system vulnerable when that currency is “weaponized” in times of geopolitical strain.
Project mBridge and Cross-Border Experiments
China’s international push runs through Project mBridge, a multi-central bank platform built to settle transactions directly between CBDCs and now governed by its participating central banks—the PBOC, the Hong Kong Monetary Authority, and the central banks of Thailand, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia—after the Bank for International Settlements stepped back in October 2024.
From just 164 pilot transactions worth about $22 million in 2022, mBridge has scaled to more than 4,000 cross-border transfers totalling roughly $55.49 billion, with the e-CNY accounting for about 95% of settlement volume.
Chinese visitors are also using the digital yuan in trials across border areas and tourist spots such as Hong Kong, Macau, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, and Singapore, paying local merchants by scanning QR codes with e-CNY wallets.
2026 Agenda Focuses on Banks, Trade Flows and Stablecoin Competition
This year, the PBOC is expected to focus on tighter integration of the e-CNY with banks, wider use in trade and energy settlements, and more explicit competition with yield-bearing stablecoins, while embedding the project in China’s next five-year plan.
