More than 2.6 million users signed up for the City of Shenzhen’s digital yuan airdrop

China

The city has about 18 million residents in its prefecture-level area.

According to data obtained from local news outlet Sohu.com, the Shenzhen Chamber of Commerce has recorded over 2.6 million signups for its latest digital yuan, or e-CNY, airdrop. Two months prior, the City of Shenzhen announced that it would be airdropping 30 million of the e-CNY central bank digital currency, or CBDC, to local residents to stimulate consumer spending as a recovery measure to the country's strict coronavirus lockdown.

Users who received the airdrops through a randomized lottery selection could then spend the e-CNY vouchers at various participating merchants' terminals on Meituan, one of China's leading e-commerce platforms. The event, which ran from May 30 to June 19, attracted more than 67,000 merchants.

Similarly, on Wednesday, the City of Fuzhou announced that it would be airdropping 20 million e-CNY to local residents. Users who passed through Know Your Customer identification and have a local number could then log in to the "e-Fuzhou" city app and enter a lottery draw for 100 e-CNY per airdrop. The airdropped digital yuan is dispensable at over 9,000 merchants around the city.

China's CBDC efforts have gained momentum since the beginning of the year, with the country's central bank planning to expand the number of e-CNY test sites to 23, up from 11. In the City of Tianjin, it is now possible to take out a loan denominated in e-CNY as well as pay for metro tickets using digital currency. Between April 2, when the e-CNY was introduced to Tianjin, and Sunday, local residents made approximately 1.86 million e-CNY transactions, amounting to 290 million CNY across close to 39,000 vendors.

Blockchain

CasperLabs is building an open-permissioned blockchain protocol and will be a service provider to China’s Blockchain-based Service Network.

On Friday, CasperLabs, a blockchain software firm, announced a partnership with China's Blockchain-based Service Network, or BSN. Through the agreement, which has been minted as a nonfungible token, or NFT, as a sign of commemoration, Casper Network will be added as the blockchain of choice to the Fuzhou City Chain for use in public and private crypto infrastructure developments in the region — dubbed "Fuzhou Chain powered by Casper." RockTree Capital, an investment company, based in New York, played a critical role in bridging the entente between Casper and Fuzhou City.

As told by stakeholders, the partnership's main goal is to enable BSN to gain from Casper's scalability, security, and decentralization, as well as the use of the open-permissioned blockchain, or OPB, protocol to eliminate the need for using cryptocurrencies to pay for gas fees. Since its launch in 2019, BSN has expanded to more than 120 public city nodes across China, serving as data centers running and processing transactions on its umbrella blockchain networks.

Mrinal Manohar, co-founder, and CEO of CasperLabs, said of the development:

By partnering with Casper, the BSN gains from Casper’s scalability, security, and decentralization. The use of OPB eliminates the use of cryptocurrencies to pay for gas fees. All combined, this makes it much simpler for developers in and around Fuzhou to generate public and private blockchain applications at a lower cost.

Fuzhou