Chinese City Suzhou to Distribute $5 Million in Digital Yuan

China is extending its digital yuan trial yet again as the city of Suzhou has announced the lottery to distribute 30 million yuan (around $5 million) among the residents in digital fiat.

The city government will distribute 150,000 red packets, each with 200 yuan (around $31). Though the giveaway will take place on Friday, the results will be announced on February 10.

All the recipients of the digital yuan need to spend the money on online e-commerce partner platform, JD.com and a few other offline stores between February 10 and February 26.

An Efficient Way to Test Digita Yuan

This is one of the many such digital yuan distributions done by the local Chinese government. Last month, the populous city of Shenzhen distributed 20 million in digital yuan (around $3 million) in a similar lottery.

Suzhou already gave away about $3 million in digital yuan red packets in December, making the recent one its second distribution.

China has already completed the development of its digital fiat and is now testing it extensively across the nation. The first trial started with the distribution of the digital fiat among some of the government employees, which was soon taken to a large scale from city to city.

Additionally, the People’s Bank of China (PBoC) inked deals with several private companies to allow the citizens to spend the digital yuan, JD.com is one of them. Other prominent partners are DiDi, Meituan and Bilibili.

Testing of the digital yuan with such a locally coordinated giveaway seems to be efficient as the country’s digital currency completed 20,000 transactions in December 2020.

Meanwhile, the Chinese central bank is in talks with its Hong Kong counterpart to test digital yuan in the special administrative region. However, that is only to test the cross border features of the DC/EP.