Читать книгу The Digital War - Winston Ma - Страница 31

Since the coronavirus became a pandemic and people dived into remote working in March 2020, video-conferencing services have become vital components of this new way of life. Zoom, an until then little-known online platform, has emerged as the go-to service for not only virtual meetings and classroom lessons, but also church services, costume parties, romantic dates, and even wedding ceremonies. Zoom has quickly become the No. 1 video-conferencing platform in the United States, more popular than similar offerings from Google, Microsoft, and Facebook. Between December 2019 and April 2000, Zoom's daily meeting participants jumped 30-fold to 300 million in a mere five months.

Whereas Zoom is headquartered in the United States and listed on the Nasdaq exchange, the actual Zoom app appears to have been developed by companies in China. In its Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filings, Zoom has at least 700 employees who work in research and development out of its affiliated companies in China. The company founder is a native Chinese who had working experience at the US telecom giant Cisco. When Western corporations flocked to Zoom it could well have been their first time to use Chinese enterprise-solution software in their businesses. In the past, the US and European markets mostly learned about China's booming digital economy from the billion users of WeChat (the WhatsApp of China), mind-boggling e-commerce volume of Alibaba, or the goofy videos of TikTok.

Most of them, however, probably have missed a much bigger technology breakthrough in China in the same month, which further illustrates China's digital economy prowess—in the form of “hard tech” innovation—way more than pure mobile applications connecting online users. After more than six years of preparation, in April 2020 People's Bank of China (PBOC, the central bank) unveiled to the public its new digital currency, the world's first central bank digital currency (CBDC), known as the Digital Currency/Electronic Payment (DCEP), which could replace cash with a blockchain (like)-based solution.

Most likely, DCEP makes China the first major economy to adopt a native digital currency. DCEP is designed to function as the digitalization of physical cash (i.e. paper cash, coins, and banknotes) or just as the substitution of the base money supply (M0)—at least for now. Progress on the DCEP was broadly viewed as a reaction to Facebook's announcement in 2019 that it intended to launch Lybra, Facebook's planned blockchain-based digital currency, which is still trying to win approval from regulators. Unlike Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, built on the excitement regarding “decentralization”, DCEP is run from a centralized database; nevertheless, DCEP is built with blockchain and cryptography, and it has incorporated blockchain's key concepts, such as peer-to-peer payment, traceability, and tamper-proof-ness (see Figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1 How is DCEP designed?

Data Source: Media Reports, April 2020.

Since its April launch, the new digital currency has been piloted in four major cities, Shenzhen, Suzhou, Chengdu, and Xiong'an New Area, the city to replace Beijing as the country's capital. (Leveraging the blockchain technology's strength in data management, the whole city of Xiong'an has a blockchain DNA. See the “Vice Capital Built on Blockchain” box.)

In the pilot zones, DCEP has been formally adopted into the cities' monetary systems, with some government employees having started to receive their salaries in the digital currency in May 2020. People can create a DCEP wallet in their commercial bank's mobile app and use the national digital currency for expenses like transportation, education, healthcare, and other consumer goods and services. Starbucks, McDonald's, and Subway chains in China, for example, were named on the central bank list of firms to test DCEP. In July, Chinese ride-hailing giant Didi Chuxing entered a strategic partnership with the PBOC to test DCEP on its transport platform of over 500 million users. In August, China expanded DCEP trials to Beijing and several major cities—getting even closer to its official launch.