Wang Yongli: We must pay more attention to the development of stablecoins

Source: Beijing Business Daily

On May 17-18, the 2025 Tsinghua PBC Global Finance Forum was held in Shenzhen. At the sub-forum with the theme of "China's Economic Outlook in 2025", Wang Yongli, former vice president of the Bank of China and co-chairman of Digital China Information Services Group Co., Ltd., said that in the face of an increasingly complex international situation, China needs to do its own thing well and accelerate the development of domestic and international dual circulation. Among them, accelerating the cross-border payment and settlement of RMB is an important infrastructure and an important driving force.

At present, my country has made many achievements in the development of cross-border RMB payment and clearing, including promoting the development of inter-bank payment and clearing, establishing my country's own UnionPay organization, establishing and developing the RMB Cross-Border Payment System (CIPS), and increasing cooperation with

Swift.

At the same time, new formats have emerged in the field of cross-border payment and clearing, that is, the development of crypto assets has spawned the development of legal stablecoins. Today, the legal currency payment and clearing systemcannot meet the needs of 24-hour online transactions around the world, and if it cannot be exchanged with legal currency, the value of crypto assets will be difficult to realize, and its development will be severely restricted. Therefore, in Wang Yongli's view, if crypto assets are legalized, they need to be supported by the payment and clearing of currency accordingly.

Wang Yongli said that in the United States, the relationship between legal tender and crypto assets has spawned stablecoins that are pegged to legal tender at equal value, the most typical of which areUSDTand USDC. At present, stablecoins are still mainly based on the US dollar, and what kind of impact they will bring is worthy of great attention from other countries. In particular, stablecoins need to use new technologies to promote the operating efficiency of currencies, reduce costs, and have strict risk control.

After the emergence of stablecoins, we can see that not only traditional crypto assets such as Bitcoin are developing rapidly, but also new areas of digital asset securitization such as NFT andRWAhave emerged. Therefore, when promoting cross-border payment and settlement, currency cannot just stay in the traditional service methods and fields. It is necessary to use new technologies, and even learn from some models and technologies of stablecoins to transform the operation mode of currency.

Wang Yongli suggested that the mainland should pay more attention to the development of stablecoins from the industry and academic fields, and promote the further development of digital RMB. "If the stablecoin is pegged to a certain legal currency, theoretically, the stablecoin is the token of the pegged currency. Since the token can do this, why can't our legal currency?"

Wang Yongli also reminded that there are many kinds of existing US dollar stablecoins, but too many US dollar stablecoins are not necessarily a good thing. A more unified operation mechanism needs to be established.

When further discussing the development of financial technology, Wang Yongli pointed out that my country is currently at the forefront of the world in the fields of mobile payment and digital currency, but duplicate construction, data islands and security risks are becoming "reefs" that restrict high-quality development. Specifically, the self-built payment and data systems of various institutions have led to chaotic interfaces, the cost of interconnection has become increasingly high, and small and medium-sized institutions have gradually fallen behind; all data assets are actually controlled by business handlers (such as platform companies), rather than the real business initiators (users or companies), which has buried the hidden dangers of privacy leakage and abuse; the ownership of data assets is unclear, and the circulation rules are unclear, which restricts the release of the value of digital assets.

In this regard, Wang Yongli proposed to build an intensive digital infrastructure based on the digital RMB. The digital RMB adopts the unified App architecture of the central bank, which can theoretically collect all transaction data and realize accurate traceability of natural person/legal person dimensions. If this model is extended to identity information management, users may be able to replace physical certificates with digital IDs and independently set information usage scenarios and timeliness.

"If there are actual breakthroughs in these areas, the so-called digital currency, digital assets, digital finance, and digital society will have deep-rooted changes." Wang Yongli said.