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- China launches smart contracts for its digital yuan, on leading shopping application Meituan.
- Ethereum smart contracts are still healthy and likely to outpace the completion.
China is still on the path of increasing adoption for its country’s central backed digital currency (CBDC). In its most recent attempt to further usage, the country has launched interactive smart contracts for its CBDC ; the digital yuan.
China kicks off the new year with a recent smart contact functionality launch. It took place on the 17th of January 2023, and runs on one of the country’s most popular application Meituan.
The smart contract launch comes four months after the country’s PBOC’s Digital Currency Institute teased the integration of a smart-contract functionality. Shortly after, the announcement was followed up with the launch of a smart contract-based function. It was designed to halt the collection of funds from payees, who might be making away with prepaid funds.
In a bid to attract users, the smart contract is giving users a daily price for usage. Users can take in as much as 8,888 RMB (1,312) on a daily basis.
However, the offer is only open to users who make a purchase for payment on the application, using China’s digital yuan.
As reported by a local media platform, users are able to earn a portion of the 8,888 RMB. When the smart contract tracks and finds specific keywords from the users’ items and purchases that tally with the words it generated for that day.
If both the words generated by the smart contract, and the words on the users’ items and name matches, the user will win some of the money up for grabs. The cash prize will be transferred into their digital yuan wallet.
Is China’s new smart contract relevant enough to outperform Ethereum’s?
Meituan is a leading E-commerce shopping application. Formerly known as Meituan-Dianping, the application helps users local customer products and other retail services.
According to data from the statistics platform expandedramblings, Meituan had a monthly merchant count total of 8.3 million. The application also had an active monthly user count of 290 million and 600 million registered users as of April 2018.
With a large number of users on the platform, adoption for the digital yuan is likely going to surge in the near future. The added daily benefits are also attractive to users, and is poised to increase usage of the newly integrated smart contract.
However, Ethereum’s smart contract platform might not be severely affected by the digital yuan’s smart contract. This is particularly because the demand for Ethereum smart contracts is still notably high.
Additionally , statistics from Web3 dev platform Alchemy, revealed that Ethereum smart contract deployment surged by an outstanding 293% in 2022. During the fourth quarter of the same year, smart contract deployment on Ethereum surged by 453%.
