Smoothening Digital Payments for Huawei Users
Huawei, the Chinese telecom giant, has introduced a key innovation by integrating the central bank digital currency, digital yuan, into its HarmonyOS NEXT operating system. This important update has now enabled nearly 1 billion Huawei smartphone users to make seamless digital yuan transactions with no additional downloads of any app, therefore taking a big leap forward toward a cashless and interlinked economy in China. This integration therefore makes the payment process in several respects easier for users and thus makes the digital yuan even more available for daily use.
HarmonyOS NEXT: A Quantum Leap
HarmonyOS NEXT, HarmonyOS 5.0, was announced on October 22 and is a further advance in operating systems from Huawei. Independently developed due to the sanctions and restrictions placed on Huawei by the U.S., which had limited the access of Huawei to Google’s Android ecosystem, HarmonyOS NEXT is one of the independent and separate OSs out there globally. Being the third most popular in the world after Android and iOS, it has taken the lead in pioneering support for only native HarmonyOS applications, a factor that improves system performance and application compatibility.
Improved Financial Inclusion
By directly embedding digital yuan into HarmonyOS NEXT, Huawei has enabled the functionality of digital currency access within the system without an additional app. This will then include wallet management and support the connectivity of other financial services. It also provides grounds for increased digital yuan support across IoT devices, further facilitating financial operations in Huawei’s ecosystem. This also aligns with the People’s Bank of China’s goal to embed the digital yuan across hardware, modules, and devices for monitoring and security.
Movement of the Digital Yuan in China
The digital yuan has been pervading every corner of the country. Most recently, it was everywhere at events in the 2024 China Science Fiction Conference, Craft Beer Festival, and the 2024 World Table Tennis Championships-all happening in Beijing. By now, residents of Beijing alone have more than 22 million digital yuan wallets. At the international level, the digital yuan marked yet another important milestone when it was integrated into the International Air Transport Association, or IATA, to become the 74th currency accepted for global airline payments, the first central bank digital currency anywhere in the world to do so.
Leading Digital Currency Adoption
China continues to play a leading role in the adoption of digital currencies through the use of innovative partnerships, such as the integration of the digital yuan by Huawei, that will grease the wheels for broader CBDC use. As this development shows, China’s digital economy is getting stronger, flexing muscles that could make it a leading influencer of global trends in digital finance.
