China’s central bank digital currency takes a bigger place on WeChat’s platform

For the last few years, China’s central bank has been trying to ramp up the adoption of digital yuan, or e-CNY, which forms part of the country’s monetary base, M0. The bank has a designated app for e-CNY that crossed 261 million individual users in early 2022, but it’s also enlisting help from the private sector to take its official digital money to a broader user base.

China’s biggest messager WeChat said Wednesday that it’s extended the use of e-CNY payments to transactions happening through its short video and mini-app platforms, which together cover merchants from small influencers to brands touting products on WeChat.

For those unfamiliar with WeChat, the Tencent-owned messenger is a sprawling empire that far exceeds what WhatsApp or Messenger can do. It comes with its own payments system, WeChat Pay; supports millions of third-party lite apps, making it a rival to the App Store; has a short video network that competes with Douyin, TikTok’s Chinese version, for eyeball time; and a host of other features that can easily be standalone apps — but Asia loves super apps.