Digital yuan aims to rival USD and not Bitcoin, Sino Global Capital CEO

With the upcoming digital yuan, China will aim to rival the USD and not Bitcoin, says Matthew Graham, the CEO of Beijing-based Sino Global Capital. After analyzing the highly-anticipated digital currency, Graham said that China sees new technologies as a “leapfrog opportunity” to challenge the dollar’s authority. 

Speaking with Boxmining founder Michael Gu at the Unitize conference, Graham said: 

Swift, CHIPS, Fedwire [...] they’re antiquated, they're expensive, they're slow. It's 2020 and we have transactions that take three days to clear and that are far more expensive than they should be. All of these technologies that underpin much of the USD-centric global economy are really showing their age. So that's a big opportunity [for China].

According to Gu, Beijing’s upcoming digital currency electronic payment system (DCEP) has borrowed several technological details from blockchain, including concepts like UTXO. Nevertheless, DCEP is not similar to public blockchains like Bitcoin. It will reportedly be issued by the People’s Bank of China and remain under the central bank’s full control, as with other national fiat currencies. 

Graham further added that DCEP could be very useful for implementing negative interest rates. Additionally, it opens up many capabilities in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning for fraud detection. He emphasized that DCEP isn't about Bitcoin. “It's about potentially internationalizing renminbi, at least to some extent.”