The state-owned Bank of China on Tuesday announced a new program bridging primary school education with smart contracts, reported a local news outlet Sohu.com. Now, the residents of Chengdu, a Sichuan city located in Sichuan, a Chinese province, can enroll their children in after-school or extracurricular lessons using e-CNY, a central bank digital cryptocurrency. It is made possible through the collaboration between financial authorities and local education.
To the unfamiliar, China has adopted a dual or two-tier operational system for e-CNY, with the commercial institutions and the central bank, on each tier. The People’s Bank of China is in-charge of the issuing, canceling, institutional interconnection, and wallet management of e-CNY. Commercial banks are acting as designated operating institutions and are at the front offering e-CNY exchange services.
Parents will be required to make a deposit for a series of lessons to a private educational entity as part of the pilot test. Later, a smart contract will create each lesson on a pro-rata basis to the deposit. It will ensure that if the children happen to miss a lesson, the e-CNY payment will be credited back automatically to their account through smart contract. The Bank of China explained that the program aims to leverage the benefits of e-CNY smart contracts. For instance, replacing regulatory authorities in supervising payment transactions between private education entities and parents is one use-case. Another could be the improvement of transactions’ liquidity through zero transaction fees embedded in the e-CNY design.
The Bank of China earlier launched an e-CNY airdrop program for Chongqing’s residents under the local initiative to reduce carbon emissions. The users can distribute their funds on receiving the airdrop for various things such as food deliveries without packaged utensils, recyclable shopping bags, tickets to public transport and scooter rides. Under the country’s strategy to entirely digitize the economy through leveraging emerging technologies such as blockchain, over 4,567,000 merchants in China now accept e-CNY as payment.
Source: https://www.thecoinrepublic.com/2022/08/19/bank-of-china-introduces-latest-e-cny-smart-contract-for-primary-students/