Wang Yongli: Greater attention should be paid to the development of stablecoins.

Source: Beijing Business Daily

From May 17 to 18, 2025, the Tsinghua Wudaokou Global Financial Forum will be held in Shenzhen. At the sub-forum themed “2025 China Economic Outlook,” Wang Yongli, former Vice President of Bank of China and Co-Chairman of Digital China Holdings Limited, stated that in the face of increasingly complex international circumstances, China needs to solidly take care of its own affairs and accelerate the development of domestic and international dual circulation. Among them, accelerating the cross-border payment and clearing of the Renminbi is an important infrastructure and a significant driving force.

Currently, in the development of cross-border payment and settlement of the Renminbi, our country has achieved numerous accomplishments, including promoting the development of interbank payment and settlement, establishing our own UnionPay organization, the establishment and development of the Cross-border Interbank Payment System (CIPS), and enhancing cooperation with SWIFT.

At the same time, new forms have emerged in the field of cross-border payment and clearing, namely the development of fiat stablecoins driven by the growth of crypto assets. Currently, the fiat payment and clearing system cannot meet the demand for 24-hour online trading globally. If crypto assets cannot be exchanged for fiat currency, their value will be difficult to realize, and their development will be severely restricted. Therefore, in Wang Yongli’s view, if crypto assets are to be legalized, corresponding support from the payment and clearing of currency is required.

Wang Yongli stated that in the United States, the emergence of stablecoins pegged to fiat currency values has occurred between fiat currency and crypto assets, with USDT and USDC being the most typical examples. Currently, stablecoins are mainly dominated by the US dollar, and the implications of this deserve high attention from other countries. In particular, stablecoins need to leverage new technologies to enhance the operational efficiency of currency, reduce costs, and ensure strict risk control.

After the emergence of stablecoins, it can be seen that not only traditional cryptocurrency assets like Bitcoin are rapidly developing, but new fields of digital asset securitization such as NFTs and RWAs are also emerging. Therefore, when currency promotes cross-border payment and settlement, it cannot remain limited to traditional service methods and domains. It is necessary to utilize new technologies and even learn from some models and technologies of stablecoins to transform the operation of currency.

Wang Yongli suggested that the mainland should give more attention to the development of stablecoins from both the industry and academic fields, and promote the further development of the digital RMB. “If stablecoins are pegged to a certain fiat currency, theoretically, stablecoins are tokens that are linked to the currency. Since tokens can achieve this level, why can’t our fiat currency?”

Wang Yongli also reminded that there are a variety of existing dollar stablecoins, but having too many dollar stablecoins may not be a good thing. A more unified operational mechanism needs to be established.

When further discussing the development of financial technology, Wang Yongli pointed out that China is currently at the forefront of the world in areas such as mobile payment and digital currency. However, issues like redundant construction, data silos, and security risks are becoming “reefs” restricting high-quality development. Specifically, various institutions building their own payment and data systems have led to interface chaos, increasing interoperability costs, and small and medium-sized institutions are gradually falling behind; all data assets are essentially controlled by the business operators (such as platform companies), rather than the true initiators of the business (users or enterprises), which creates risks of privacy breaches and abuse; unclear ownership of data assets and ambiguous circulation rules hinder the release of digital asset value.

In this regard, Wang Yongli proposed to build an intensive digital infrastructure based on the model of digital RMB. The digital RMB adopts a unified app architecture from the central bank, which theoretically can aggregate all transaction data and achieve precise traceability at the individual/legal person dimension. If this model is extended to identity information management, users may be able to replace physical documents with a digital ID and autonomously set the usage scenarios and validity of their information.

“If there are practical breakthroughs in these areas, then the so-called digital currency, digital assets, digital finance, and digital society will undergo profound changes,” said Wang Yongli.