The era of digital renminbi 2.0 begins.

Previously, the digital RMB was positioned as a digital form of cash in circulation, being a direct liability of the central bank. "While this ensures its legal and safety aspects, it also brings inherent contradictions: the wallet is opened and maintained by commercial banks, with responsibilities such as anti-money laundering borne by commercial banks, but the funds are recorded on the central bank's balance sheet, and commercial banks cannot independently manage the assets and liabilities of wallet balances," pointed out an industry insider. "Promoting the use of digital RMB to customers not only reduces their deposits in banks, but also requires significant investment and manpower costs to issue digital RMB and maintain the normal operation of customer digital wallets. This has led to a lack of intrinsic economic incentive for commercial banks to promote digital RMB," said Liu Xiaochun, Vice President of Shanghai New Financial Research Institute. Version 2.0 fundamentally solves this contradiction. "This is equivalent to users 'depositing' digital RMB back into the bank, and they are deposited into a brand-new, standardized deposit account," compared Wang Jian, Chief Analyst of Bank Industry at Guoxin Securities. As a major innovation in the national financial infrastructure, digital RMB has certain potential to improve cross-border payment services. The traditional correspondent banking model for cross-border payments has systemic pain points such as lengthy processes, high costs, low efficiency, and lack of transparency, making it difficult to meet the growing demand for cross-border trade of small and medium-sized enterprises and high-frequency small remittances by individuals. With the rapid spread of artificial intelligence technology, the major trend in the digital and intelligent development of the traditional financial industry requires payment tools to become more intelligent. In practice, the multilateral central bank digital currency bridge project has become an important stage for the cross-border application of digital RMB.