China may be about to launch a fiat digital currency, but in all likelihood, it will only resemble a cryptocurrency on the surface. And it probably won’t use a blockchain. While inspired to some degree by bitcoin and the like, the effort is explicitly framed as a strategy to beat them back. The project was thrust into the spotlight last weekend when a senior official from the People’s Bank of China (PBoC) said at a closed-door conference that the country’s central bank digital currency (CBDC) is ready to launch. In his speech, widely covered in the press, Changchun Mu, deputy director at the PBoC’s payments division, ... (full story)