JD.com has been using China’s Digital Currency Electronic Payment System, or DCEP, to pay salaries for some employees since January.
The e-commerce company revealed the news on Sunday while announcing its participation in the DCEP’s one-year trial expo at the fourth Digital China Summit in Fuzhou scheduled for Sunday and Monday.
Commenting on its digital yuan adoption journey, the company said that in addition to paying staff salaries, JD has also used DCEP for business-to-business payments to partner businesses as well as for inter-bank settlements.
As previously reported by Cointelegraph, JD Technology and Digital Currency Research Institute – the company’s fintech arm – has been a DCEP development partner with the People’s Bank of China since September 2020.
In December, the online retailer began accepting digital yuan as a payment method on its website. According to a previous Cointelegraph report, JD.com received nearly 20,000 DCEP-funded orders in the first week of adoption.
JD also supported the DCEP trials, contributing around $4.6 million to Suzhou’s second public lottery event in February. Commenting on the company’s continued support for the digital yuan, Fei Peng, Head of DCEP at JD Tech, said, “JD Technology will continue to combine strengths in supply chain, omni-channel scenarios, advanced technology and customer service experience to further contribute to the DC/EP Ecosystem.
Meanwhile, JD’s continued support for the digital yuan further relieves AliPay and WeChat Pay’s absence of multiple DECP trials. From ride-sharing services like DiDi Chuxing to streaming platforms like Bilibili, several companies are involved in testing China’s central bank digital currency, except for the country’s two largest payment gateways.
Views on whether the DCEP will seek to challenge the AliPay-WeChat Pay duopoly in China’s electronic payments market remain mixed. In October 2020, Zhou Xiaochuan, a former PBoC governor, argued that the digital yuan was the central bank’s counterbalance to the dollarization of the economy.
