Digital Renminbi enters the "Deposit Currency Era": The RWA infrastructure opportunities behind Hunan's 56.7 billion yuan transactions
In early February 2026, Hunan Province’s digital renminbi pilot program delivered an impressive milestone. According to a report by Hunan Daily on February 4, by the end of 2025, the total transaction volume of digital renminbi in the province had surpassed 56.7 billion yuan, supporting over 600,000 merchants, with 25.38 million wallets opened. Monthly transaction activity ranked among the top in nationwide pilot regions. More importantly, the report explicitly stated that starting January 1, 2026, the digital renminbi system officially entered the “Digital Deposit Currency Era.”
This institutional leap marks a shift in the development focus of digital renminbi from initial scene expansion and user cultivation to deeper financial functionality evolution and ecosystem construction. For the RWA Research Institute, which focuses on cutting-edge fintech, this is not just a successful local pilot case but a crucial window into how China’s legal digital currency is reshaping the digitization process of real-world assets (RWA). The “value anchor” attribute and programmable potential of digital renminbi are paving an innovative and compliant underlying platform for on-chain real assets, rights confirmation, and circulation. The mission of the payment tool has been initially achieved, but the journey as a financial infrastructure has only just begun.
- Institutional Transition: From Digital Cash to Digital Deposit 2.0 Era
The achievements of Hunan’s pilot are remarkable. By the end of 2025, over 600,000 merchants in Hunan supported digital renminbi payments, with a cumulative transaction volume of 56.7 billion yuan. Monthly transaction counts and amounts have long ranked among the top in nationwide pilot regions.
Behind these figures is Hunan’s continuous effort to promote digital renminbi applications. In 2025, the People’s Bank of China Hunan Branch, together with the Changsha municipal government, organized a series of consumer promotion activities involving relevant banks, investing a total of 15 million yuan, successfully stimulating about 3.5 billion yuan in consumption.
More fundamentally, a systemic reform was implemented. According to Lu Lei, member of the Party Committee and Vice Governor of the People’s Bank of China, the “Action Plan for Further Strengthening the Digital Renminbi Management Service System and Related Financial Infrastructure Construction” officially took effect on January 1, 2026.
The core breakthrough of this plan is the reshaping of the value attributes of digital renminbi. Banking institutions are required to pay interest on real-name digital renminbi wallet balances and adhere to self-regulated deposit rate pricing agreements.
At the monetary level, this means digital renminbi has officially transitioned from M0 to M1, and potentially into M2 in the future. This shift is not just a technical upgrade but a “paradigm leap” in the entire currency operation system.
- New Integration of Digital Renminbi and Real Assets: Changes in Value Logic
The 2026 work conference of the People’s Bank of China sent a clear signal: “Strengthening virtual currency regulation” and “Steadily developing digital renminbi” are placed within the same policy framework. For the RWA field dedicated to mapping real assets onto the blockchain, this marks a critical turning point.
Historically, RWA projects relied on volatile cryptocurrencies as valuation and settlement tools. This model faced strict regulation in China and increased transaction uncertainty and compliance risks.
The legal status and national credit endorsement of digital renminbi offer a new solution. Unlike virtual currencies, digital renminbi employs a “controllable anonymity” design, protecting user privacy while meeting anti-money laundering and anti-terrorist financing regulatory requirements.
For RWA, digital renminbi provides three core values: a definite legal value anchor, programmable smart contract capabilities, and compliant, efficient transaction channels.
This shift is prompting industry strategic realignment. Some market observers note that practitioners are shifting focus from “riding the virtual currency wave” to “integrating into the new national fintech infrastructure represented by digital renminbi.”
- How China’s RWA Projects Utilize Digital Renminbi: Three Practical Cases
China’s RWA practices show a different path from the global market. While overseas markets mainly focus on standardized financial products, China’s RWA development emphasizes deep exploration of real industry pain points, especially in new energy, agriculture, and high-end manufacturing.
In August 2024, Langxin Group partnered with Ant Financial Science and Technology to successfully implement China’s first RWA project based on real energy assets in Hong Kong. The project used charging stations as physical collateral, with a financing amount of about 100 million yuan, underwritten by UBS.
Technologically, Ant’s DT RWA platform enabled real-time, trustworthy mapping of charging station assets into the digital world. Leveraging cross-border digital finance capabilities, it connected settlement channels in HKD, USD, and other currencies.
Another typical case is the Malu grape agricultural RWA project. As China’s first RWA application in agriculture, it uses crop products and their full lifecycle production data as underlying assets.
Through IoT technology, environmental parameters such as soil moisture, temperature, and sunlight are collected in real time. These data are processed via blockchain to generate digital tokens, giving each grape bunch a unique on-chain identity.
With digital renminbi entering the “deposit currency era,” these projects will benefit from more stable and efficient legal digital payment and settlement tools.
- Cross-Border Applications: How Digital Renminbi Goes Global
Hunan has actively explored cross-border applications of digital renminbi during the pilot. Using international events like the China-Africa Economic and Trade Expo, Hunan promotes digital renminbi to domestic and foreign audiences and encourages banks to implement multilateral central bank digital currency (CBDC) bridge services across the province.
This cross-border exploration provides valuable reference for the internationalization of RWA projects. The multilateral CBDC bridge, based on blockchain and distributed ledger technology, enables interoperability among multiple central bank digital currencies.
The bridge offers real-time transactions, low costs, transparent processes, and controllable risks. Data shows that through this system, cross-border payment settlement time can be reduced from 3-5 days to 6-9 seconds, with significantly lower costs.
From June 2024 to the end of 2025, the multilateral CBDC bridge processed 4,868 cross-border payments, totaling approximately 477.8 billion yuan, with digital renminbi accounting for about 96% of the transaction volume across currencies.
These figures demonstrate that digital renminbi’s cross-border application has reached a preliminary scale. For RWA projects, this means future opportunities for more efficient, low-cost cross-border asset transactions and capital flows through this system.
- Global Comparison: How Does China’s RWA Path Differ?
The global RWA market is growing rapidly. Industry data shows that by August 2025, the total value of the global RWA market reached about $66 billion, up from approximately $15 billion at the end of 2024—a more than threefold increase in less than a year.
Internationally, giants like BlackRock, JPMorgan Chase, and Franklin Templeton are actively promoting tokenization of US Treasuries, securities, real estate, and other standardized financial assets.
In contrast, China’s RWA practice emphasizes integration with the real economy, especially in new energy, agriculture, and high-end manufacturing sectors.
This difference reflects distinct development logic: the international market’s core driver is leveraging blockchain to improve efficiency and accessibility of traditional financial assets; China’s approach focuses on solving real economic issues such as financing difficulties, liquidity shortages, and high trust costs through technological means.
Hong Kong, as an international financial hub, plays a unique role in connecting China’s RWA practices with global markets. In 2025, UBS, Chainlink, and DigiFT jointly launched an RWA pilot project in Hong Kong to enhance compliance and operational efficiency through on-chain automation.
- Innovation and Compliance: Dual Challenges for RWA
Digital renminbi offers new development pathways for RWA, but the field still faces the challenge of balancing innovation and compliance. The 2026 work conference of the People’s Bank of China explicitly prioritized “strengthening virtual currency regulation,” exerting direct pressure on projects closely tied to virtual currencies.
Under this regulatory environment, projects strongly linked to virtual currencies, with opaque transaction structures or unclear asset rights, face unprecedented compliance challenges.
Some fake RWA projects have become targets of regulatory crackdowns. These often claim to tokenize real assets like real estate, art, or commodities without genuine backing.
To address these issues, the industry is exploring “compliance as code” solutions. For example, KRNL and similar projects create programmable kernels that abstract regulatory requirements into modular code, enabling RWA projects to quickly adapt to multiple jurisdictions.
In mainland China, regulators adopt a cautious stance. In 2024, the China Securities Industry Association issued the “Guidelines for Blockchain in Asset Management (Draft for Comments),” emphasizing three principles: on-chain assets must be based on verifiable underlying assets, with traceable, auditable, and transparent on-chain data.
- Outlook: What Will Digital Renminbi + RWA Bring?
As digital renminbi enters the “deposit currency era,” China’s RWA development will follow a clearer path. Domestically, the focus will be on the digital renminbi ecosystem, exploring applications in asset digitization, supply chain finance, and data asset pledges.
This approach emphasizes “moving from virtual to real,” deeply integrating blockchain with the real economy. The goal is to enhance liquidity and financing efficiency of traditional assets through technological innovation, rather than creating detached financial products.
In terms of asset types, sectors aligned with national strategies—such as green energy and digital economy—may become priority areas for RWA exploration. For example, the tokenization of photovoltaic assets at GCL System Integration Technology demonstrates this trend.
In cross-border applications, Hong Kong will continue to serve as a “super connector.” Mainland enterprises can leverage Hong Kong’s compliant frameworks to connect with global capital and markets. Future collaborations between Shenzhen, Hainan, and Hong Kong may explore models like “Hong Kong registration, Hainan outbound.”
Industry standards will also be improved. In March 2025, led by the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, nearly 20 companies initiated the “Trusted Blockchain for On-Chain Real Asset Standards,” providing technical frameworks and operational guidelines for the industry.
When digital renminbi’s transaction volume exceeds 56.7 billion yuan, behind this figure are over 600,000 merchants and 25.38 million wallets forming a vast ecosystem.
Simultaneously, the institutional upgrade of digital renminbi into the deposit currency era, along with policies integrating RWA into compliant channels, is reshaping fintech innovation pathways.
Whether it’s individuals earning small interest on digital wallets, multinational companies conducting instant cross-border payments via multilateral CBDC bridges, or each kilowatt-hour of solar power being credibly recorded and mapped as digital rights, all signals point to a future—one built on national credit, driven by digital technology, deeply serving the real economy—a new financial paradigm accelerating into reality.
Source materials include: · “Global Digital Currency Competition Escalates, Renminbi Breaks New Barriers” · “Hunan Has Opened 25.38 Million Digital Renminbi Wallets” · “High-Quality Development of Digital Renminbi to Support a Strong Financial Nation”
Author: Liang Yu | Editor: Zhao Yidan