A Chinese investor has suggested that the much talked-about China’s digital currency could be released sooner than expected, just as the CEO of the world’s largest cryptocurrency by volume, Binance, heightens the optimism that has surrounded the Asian giant’s recent endorsement of the blockchain technology saying its impact would be huge globally.

The managing director of the private equity arm of Foxconn, HCM Capital, Jack Lee, mulls the idea of an early next year launch in an interview. He says China already has a strong third-party payment network for its digital currency electronic payment (DCEP) project hence it can be launched soon.

“China, I would say, will be one of the most favourable countries to use this kind of technology. Number one, China government, from PBoC, has been tracking where the money used in tech (is coming from)”, Lee says, adding that secondly, with regards to the proposed DCEP, China “already has all the system and networks ready. I think you will see it very soon, in the next maybe two to three months…You may see some test run first but you’ll see it very soon in 2020.”

The potential for the digital currency gets even more significant as the push for central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) continues among nations of the world, like in Tunisia which just announced the proposed launch of its CBDC. The impact of a CBDC could be far-reaching in a country like China where the use of mobile payments has grown exponentially in the past five years according to an OMFIF/IBM report. It says the People’s Bank of China reported a 36-fold increase in the volume of mobile transaction between 2013 and 2018 to 61 bln from 1.7 bln – China has the largest share on their digital transactions due to the operations of Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent. The report also touches on more CBDCs being created in the next five years while China is reportedly expected to launch theirs within five months.

To add his voice to the recent interest shown in the blockchain space by the Chinese state, Binance’s Changpeng Zhao (or CZ) registers what he expects of the development in coming days as he told his audience at the Binance Super Meetup in Singapore on Tuesday Nov. 12 what he thinks the likely impact of China’s new stance towards the blockchain would be on the rest of the world. He says:

“Chinese people have a lot of money. That’s just a fact. When a fairly rich country have such a positive stance towards blockchain, towards this industry, that means not only this 1.4 billion people, they are going to influence other countries to adopt favourable regulations towards crypto/blockchain now,” CZ said. “So, now the other countries are saying, ‘Look, China is adopting this stance, we have to follow. We can’t really ban crypto now.’ I think the other countries will have a really tough time banning crypto now.”

Citing China’s move as setting a big example for the rest of the world to follow, CZ is of the view that the global population of seven billion people will be exposed to favourable crypto regulations with time even though many people still don’t realize the impact of the huge move as at yet.

“So, now there is a race going on. The impact of this is huge,” he adds. “I always knew that crypto is not going away, but this is the point where everybody else should know that crypto is not going away, and this industry is going to be big.”