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What principles should guide the next phase of CBDC development? First, clarity about the value proposition for users. In many countries, there simply isn't demand for central bank money for retail payments. China's payment giants (Alipay, WeChat Pay) and India's Unified Payments Interface have made low-cost digital payments easily and widely available. In the US, the Federal Reserve's instant payment service FedNow will increase the system's efficiency and resilience... Still, a well-designed CBDC could play an incremental role in catalysing payments innovation. Other advantages, such as the ability to facilitate payments using near-field communication even when cellular and wireless networks are down, could also be played up.

Social media platform X took a step closer to offering payment features after receiving a money-transmitter license from a 13th U.S. state (Pennsylvania). It grants X the ability to facilitate money transfers and paves the way for the company to allow users to send money to one another, similar to PayPal's Venmo and China's WeChat. In order for X to offer payment services to users across the United States, X will need approval in every state, a process that could take up to another 18 months. Elon Musk envisions X remodeling itself into an "everything app".

"Financial ecosystems and their related transactions are increasingly relying on big tech payment service providers, such as ApplePay and WeChat. By offering these services, transacting in unregulated cryptocurrencies becomes easier. Consequently, big tech companies take a powerful position in the ecosystem, such dominance may be avoided by a decentralized ecosystem, in which decision making power is distributed over several actors. Emergence of several highly unregulated cryptocurrencies and increased reliance on big tech, motivates central banks to investigate alternatives, called Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) that can be subject to governance and rules. CBDC is specifically aimed to decrease dependency on largely uncontrolled big tech payment service providers and to limit the growth of unregulated cryptocurrencies. In this paper, we explore the key question of how to design a governance structure, we do that by applying the DECENT ontology and conceptual models to the real world use-case of CBDC."

Wych have designed a donation model based on QR code technology. With the public already using QR codes, it provided a sensible solution to make it easy for generous kiwis to scan and donate. The generation of Wych's localized codes will allow 80 different areas around New Zealand to raise support through card based donations and the money will directly impact the community they are in. This is not an entirely new idea. I have seen it in operation by panhandlers in China on the AliPay and WeChat Pay platforms.

As part of its e-CNY central bank digital currency (CBDC) pilot, the People's Bank of China (PBOC) has launched a "hongbao" red packet feature, that allows users to send each other digital yuan-filled red packets. This comes just a month ahead of the Lunar New Year, when the Chinese traditionally give out red envelopes filled with cash to family and friends as a symbol of well wishes. The e-CNY app has been available in limited trials since 2020, but it continues to be an uphill battle to convince the Chinese public to use it. Digital yuan transactions hit $88 billion yuan ($12 billion) at the end of 2021, crossed the $100 billion yuan threshold at the end of August 2022.

Simply put, the Libra Masterplan is a combination of the Bitcoin Playbook (to allow the currency to spread globally without regulatory responsibility) and the WeChat Playbook (to harvest as much data as possible and earn as much ad revenue as possible by introducing money into a popular chat app).

China's digital currency will have two tiers, comprising the first level distributed by the central bank to commercial banks, and a second layer used by retail customers. The first-level design of the CBDC has been "basically completed" along with the formulation of technical standards and interoperability tests. The e-yuan will next be distributed to payment service providers and other private sector institutions, the central bank said in a July report published by the International Monetary Fund (IMF). To avoid such upsets, the Peoples Bank of China (PBOC) told the IMF that it is likely to limit e-yuan to small, retail transactions by setting maximum daily and yearly limits on payments and that it will only process large amounts by appointment. The PBOC said it may apply fees for large-sum or high-frequency transactions. It will also offer no interest on accounts.

"Alipay, Ant Group's third-party mobile payments platform, said it has achieved nationwide interoperability of QR payment codes with China UnionPay to meet regulatory requirements on interconnection and interoperability."