China was hoping the Winter Olympics would be a watershed moment for the digital yuan, providing a global stage on which to parade its prowess in financial innovation. Instead, geopolitical tensions, the pandemic and China's insistence on stamping out every trace of Covidare spoiling the party, dealing a blow to one of the most ambitious digital currency projects on the planet.
China is already on the verge of becoming a cashless society, but the vast majority of those electronic transactions happen on privately owned apps, outside of the immediate purview of the state. An official yuan would change that, giving Beijing an unprecedented amount of information about what people are spending their money on and where.
