WeChat, send and receive digital Lucky Money

Mobile messaging and payment app WeChat is receiving an update for the Chinese New year.

The new update will allow users to send a digital version of the traditional “Lucky Money”. The tradition of giving cash money in red envelopes has been ported to the messaging service and will allow users to send gifts to people in their WeChat groups.

There are 2 ways to send Lucky Money. The first way is to simply select the amount and the user, and then send the funds. The second option is a more traditional approach, a user decides the amount he is interested in sending to a group of people and WeChat will randomly divide the amount and distribute the money.

For example, if a user is interested in gifting a total of 100 RMBto 20 people, WeChat will randomly divide the amount, not in equal sets of 5 RMB, but is different amounts. If there are more than 20 people in a certain messaging group, the first 20 will receive money. The first person to accept the gift however will not necessarily get the larger amount.

As expected, WeChat’s main rival Alipay has already offered a digitized version of Lucky Money. However Alipay’s version did not allow for random amounts and worked by requesting an amount not gifting, taking away from the main premise.

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Image courtesy of Wikipedia