PBOC pledges steady digital yuan growth in its 2026-2030 plan

The People’s Bank of China (PBOC) said it will “steadily develop” the digital yuan over the next five years.

The e-CNY is now listed as one of the central bank’s core tasks in a recently published reform blueprint.

What provisions has China made for the development of its digital yuan?

The People’s Bank of China (PBOC) has published what it calls its “15th Five-Year” reform and development plan alongside nine separate action plans covering narrower policy areas. Monetary policy, macroprudential supervision, financing for the real economy, and higher-level opening of China’s financial system all get their own sections in these plans.

The digital yuan appears under the fifth priority, which deals with financial infrastructure and central bank services. The PBOC says it wants to improve payment systems, help the credit-reporting industry, and strengthen anti-money-laundering rules.

A separate section of the plan leans harder on the international angle. There the PBOC commits to widening the use of the renminbi in trade and investment, building out a cross-border payment network, and developing offshore RMB markets, while strengthening Shanghai as an international financial center and reinforcing Hong Kong’s standing.

The central bank already set the direction for the 15th year plan in motion at the beginning of 2026, when the PBOC created a framework letting commercial banks pay interest on client e-CNY balances. 

The PBOC began research on the e-CNY project in 2014 under the label DCEP and launched the digital yuan in April 2022, encouraging early adoption through airdrops in pilot cities.

At the 2026 National People’s Congress, deputy Fu Xiguo suggested revising PBOC’s governing law which was last updated in 2003, arguing it does not yet define the e-CNY as legal tender, Cryptopolitan reported.

Has the e-CNY been adopted outside China?

Guangdong province has released a draft of its five-year plan which the public can comment on until September 5. The plan calls for larger cross-border e-CNY payment trials and more use cases for the currency.

This urging comes after China’s first cross-border digital yuan payment with Singapore, in which ICBC branches settled close to 10 million yuan in shipping fees through the upgraded CBETS platform. That system signed on its first 26 financial institutions in June.

On the other hand, Project mBridge, a multi-central-bank settlement platform whose members include mainland China, Hong Kong, Thailand, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia, recently had its services extended by Industrial Bank to Macau and used to move 500 million yuan ($74 million) for an equity deal.

Its corporate client count for the service jumped 176% year on year in the first half. Bank of China’s Fujian branch, meanwhile, pushed more than HK$10 billion ($1.28 billion), through mBridge in what it called the platform’s largest single transfer to date.

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