A major bank silently opened a wallet service for China's central bank digital currency to public users - but quickly deactivated it after the feature gained widespread attention.
Around noon on Saturday local time, users at China Construction Bank (CCB), one of the four major state commercial banks, noticed that a central bank digital wallet feature was available on the bank's mobile app.
By searching for "digital currency" in Chinese, users of the app can navigate to the Yuan digital wallet service and further activate it by registering with a cell phone number associated with their bank accounts with CCB.
It is unclear when CCB opened the service, but news of the feature quickly spread across the Chinese cryptocurrency community and media on Saturday. Some users had managed to make small transactions by linking their CCB bank accounts to the wallet.
However, the banking giant has now disabled the feature for public users. A search for the same term in the CCB mobile app now leads to the message: “This function is not yet officially available to the public. Please wait patiently. "
However, the brief availability of the wallet shows that the Chinese commercial bank has been working towards the adoption of the Digital Yuan Initiative, also known as DCEP, led by the People's Bank of China (PBoC).
The wallet UI displayed by CoinDesk showed that each user who had activated the service was assigned a specific wallet ID which could be used to conduct transactions between the wallet and the users' CCB bank accounts.
In addition, users can also send and receive digital yuan by entering either their unique wallet ID addresses or an associated cell phone number.
Under the direction of the PBoC, the four major Chinese state-owned commercial banks have developed their respective digital yuan wallets and conducted internal tests with selected users and traders in the country.
It remains to be seen when these banks will officially open the services to the public and whether the wallets will allow for more applications that can use the digital currency.
The PBoC is also working with DiDi Chuxing and other internet-based services to apply digital yuan in more payment scenarios.