At the 12th Blockchain Global Summit in Shanghai on Sept. 23, 2026, a panel hosted by Wanxiang Blockchain Labs focused on a question that has become more concrete for policymakers, banks and market participants: how digital currency can move from payment into settlement. The session, titled “Digital Currency: From Payments to Settlement,” was moderated by Ba Qing, chief economist of HashKey Group and general manager of the group’s strategy department, with Shan Fu, president of the Hainan Jungu Digital Economy Research Institute, and Zhao Ying, partner at King & Wood Mallesons, joining the discussion.
Panel framed the issue around practical use cases
Ba said earlier sessions at the summit had already covered blockchain development in the United States, Singapore and other parts of Asia, along with recent capital-market applications. This panel, she said, would take a more practical route and look at payments and settlement, including transmission speed, liquidity needs between financial institutions, the credit basis of money and which scenarios are best suited for deployment.
In his introduction, Shan said his institute has long tracked regulatory policy and legislative developments in China’s digital economy, especially in finance. Over the past year and a half, he said, the team has focused on China’s digital economy and legislative developments in other countries. He added that the National People’s Congress has formally placed the Digital Economy Promotion Law on its legislative agenda, and that the institute hopes its research can support that process.
Zhao said she previously worked in state legislative bodies and financial departments and has followed digital-currency policy issues for many years.
Shan: cross-border trade and RMB internationalization are the two main lenses
Asked where the digital yuan may fit best in cross-border trade payments, Shan said the question should be examined from two separate angles: the needs of the real economy, and the role of the currency in RMB internationalization.
On the real-economy side, he said his recent fieldwork in Yiwu, an e-commerce industrial park in Jiangxi, and Shanghai’s newly launched cross-border trade digital finance platform pointed to a straightforward set of business demands. Exporters want to know whether they can collect funds from overseas buyers quickly and at low cost. They also want tax rebate and reconciliation processes to move faster so they do not have to carry financing costs for one or two months, or even longer.
On the internationalization side, Shan said China is the world’s largest exporter and remains a manufacturing center, but financial services in trade, especially settlement and related support, still do not fully match the scale of the country’s production and export base. That gap, in his view, shows there is still room to improve how finance serves the real economy in foreign trade.
He said the digital yuan entered a new phase after an upgrade on Jan. 1 this year, with its liability attributes extending from the central bank to commercial banks. He added that Digital Yuan 2.0 is also expanding to include payment institutions. With commercial banks and payment firms involved, he said, market incentives to push adoption should be stronger.
Shan said the digital yuan may still have “a lot of work to do” in domestic retail use, but one of its real blue-ocean opportunities could be cross-border trade. He said merchants in Yiwu, Gongqingcheng, Shenzhen and Shanghai are already exploring the issue from the standpoint of practical demand.
He also noted that any discussion of the digital yuan has to be weighed against comparable tools such as stablecoins and tokenized deposits. Serving the real economy while supporting RMB internationalization requires finding a balance, he said, though he did not claim that the right point has already been identified.
Ba: blockchain and central bank money could improve cross-border settlement
Ba said she agreed with much of that framing. In cross-border trade settlement, she said, blockchain can produce visible gains in payment speed and tax-related processing, while addressing several pain points in traditional systems. She added that when blockchain is paired with central bank money, there is room to improve not only settlement speed but also the efficiency and safety of bank-account arrangements, legal confirmation and settlement processes.
Zhao: tokenized deposits are moving beyond isolated trials
Turning to tokenized deposits, Zhao said they are likely to play a larger role in payments and settlement, especially in cross-border payment and settlement, in the next stage of market development.
She said one of the key distinctions between tokenized deposits and stablecoins is that tokenized deposits are native to the traditional banking system and have been subject to regulation from the start. She pointed to a clear development path: what began with JPMorgan using the model as an internal settlement tool has evolved into cross-institution tokenized-deposit settlement involving more than 40 major U.S. banks. That shift, she said, shows the model is moving from a single-point experiment inside one institution toward interconnection across institutions and becoming a collective choice among mainstream financial players.
Zhao said the Bank for International Settlements’ Agorá project is, in essence, another experiment that combines CBDCs with tokenized deposits.
She argued that tokenized deposits have an edge in institutional payment and settlement for cross-border trade. Compared with some earlier on-chain settlement models, their biggest strength is that they sit fully inside the existing bank regulatory system, making it easier to implement know-your-customer and anti-money laundering requirements. She added that, in the European Union’s view, tokenized deposits are not crypto-assets regulated under MiCA, but rather a new technical form of bank deposits, meaning traditional banking rules still apply.
Zhao said more financial institutions now see the advantages of blockchain and are entering the field. Once banks embrace the technology, she said, one natural result is the development of tokenized deposits, which combine blockchain’s technical features with the regulatory strengths of commercial banks. She drew a distinction in credit foundations: Web3 stablecoins rely on the credit of commercial issuers, while tokenized deposits rely on the credit of commercial banks. Because banks operate under stricter prudential rules covering capital adequacy, liquidity, KYC and anti-money laundering, she said, their credit standing is stronger than that of ordinary institutions.
That, in her view, makes tokenized deposits easier to connect with traditional finance and trade-finance settings without forcing major changes to legacy systems, while still retaining blockchain’s peer-to-peer payment and real-time clearing advantages.
Settlement finality remains tied to interbank trust and offline clearing
Ba then raised a practical question: if payment on-chain is completed at high speed, can legal confirmation and settlement finality move at that same speed, or do legal and legislative arrangements still need work?
Zhao said the issue is not only legal. It is also about how trust mechanisms are built. If a commercial bank uses tokenized deposits for payment and settlement inside its own system, she said, settlement finality is not much of a problem. The difficulty appears in cross-institution transfers.
When tokenized deposits move from Bank A to Bank B, the on-chain transfer can happen instantly and the creditor-debtor relationship between account holders can also shift. But because each bank is using its own issued tokenized deposits, interbank settlement risk still exists, she said. In effect, Bank B ends up with an off-chain claim against Bank A, and the two institutions still have to return to the existing off-chain clearing system to complete final settlement.
For Zhao, the underlying issue is that mutual recognition and trust among institutions are not fully solved. She said JPMorgan, more than 40 banks and The Clearing House in the United States are trying to build an architecture that links tokenized deposits to the traditional clearing system so that on-chain transfer and off-chain funds movement can occur in sync.
She added that the BIS Agorá project goes a step further by issuing tokenized wCBDC on the central bank side, which she described as a way to address trust among commercial banks at the root. Still, she said, any of these solutions will require matching legal arrangements on settlement finality.
Shan: digitized payment rails do not remove the physical pace of trade
Shan said Zhao’s remarks dealt with relatively real-time DvP and PvP settlement structures, and that stablecoins, tokenized deposits and the digital yuan each have their own strengths in this area.
He stressed, however, that faster settlement tools do not change the physical timing of cross-border trade. From negotiating an order and signing a contract to paying a deposit, shipping goods domestically, moving them by sea and delivering them from an overseas warehouse, a single trade cycle can take as long as two months. That timeline is determined by the physical nature of trade and cannot be compressed into two seconds, he said.
As a result, once digital yuan, stablecoins or tokenized deposits improve the legal status and speed of payment and settlement, another set of questions comes into view: the legal status of documents tied to real goods and property rights.
He cited bills of lading and warehouse receipts as examples. Bills of lading already have relatively clear legal status under maritime law in the European Union and China, and they are central in cross-border trade. But other documents, including warehouse receipts and waybills, correspond to different points in the trade process. A bill of lading may show goods have been loaded and are in transit, while a warehouse receipt may cover goods still in a warehouse in mainland China or already stored in an overseas warehouse.
Some of those instruments, Shan said, have clearer legal standing in certain jurisdictions than they do in China. He pointed to rules at the London Metal Exchange, which, while not law, have been broadly accepted by the market. He recalled the “Tsingshan nickel incident” from roughly three or four years ago, saying that although Tsingshan had enough spot inventory prepared, the legal status of the relevant warehouse receipts was not recognized by the exchange. At delivery, possession of the physical metal alone was not enough if the document itself was not accepted.
His conclusion was that once payment and settlement instruments improve, lawmakers and market participants still have to deal with the legal status of documents tied to physical and real-world assets, especially after those documents are digitized.
Ba brought in a layered account-tokenization framework
Ba said the coordination problem between on-chain speed and off-chain legal confirmation is crucial. Another way to frame it, she said, is that these documents are currently recorded across different networks and institutional systems, which makes interoperability another live issue.
She then referred to a recent Dallas Fed research framework that divides interbank account tokenization into several layers.
- The first layer is a model in which each bank issues its own tokenized deposits, as JPMorgan has done. In that arrangement, interbank settlement requires cross-chain design or bilateral settlement.
- The second layer involves more than 20 U.S. banks proposing to issue a unified token on the same chain to solve interbank transaction problems.
- A further layer would move to cross-chain, on-chain bookkeeping directly within the central bank account system, which Ba said is also the direction of the BIS Agorá project.
She noted that the digital yuan also uses a two-tier structure and asked Shan to explain that model in the broader context of network design.
Shan: payments, assets and rules are all moving toward larger networks
Shan said the scope and boundary of tokenized-deposit networks go to the heart of the matter. The same is true, he added, for whether trade documents are recognized. If a credential is recognized only inside one company, then it belongs to that company’s network. If it is recognized across an industry, it belongs to an industry network. If it is accepted nationwide, it belongs to a national network. Only when it is recognized globally does it become part of a global network.
He said one trend he sees clearly is a stronger focus on network effects and coordination effects. He referenced Metcalfe’s law, saying network value rises with the number of participating nodes. The same logic has shaped internet platforms and platform economics for years, and he believes it applies to digital currency as well.
In his view, if a payment tool — whether it is the digital yuan, tokenized deposits or a stablecoin — can only be used inside one institution, it is still just a private network. If it is shared among three, five or 50 institutions, it remains a consortium network.
Transactions have costs, he said. To truly improve cross-border trade efficiency, and to make money, assets, identity and rules all more trustworthy, systems will need to become more networked and more global. Currencies may gradually extend from regional and national forms toward monetary systems that are accepted more broadly, better matching the settlement needs of international trade.
He made a similar point on assets. Referring to remarks by Professor Lee Kuo Chuan on Southeast Asia, Shan said he has also observed a pilot model in Vietnam that resembles “domestic assets, offshore token issuance.” His interpretation is that assets previously priced and recognized mostly within Vietnam can, through blockchain, be offered to global investors. Broader participation means broader recognition and potentially fairer pricing.
Money, assets, identity and rules all follow similar logic, he said. For that reason, he sees the direction of tokenized deposits, the digital yuan and stablecoins as increasingly networked and increasingly global. China, he added, is still searching for a balance between supporting the real economy and controlling financial risk.
Asset tokenization is advancing in several jurisdictions
Ba said the discussion had focused heavily on tokenizing the funding side, but tokenization on the asset side is also moving quickly in a number of jurisdictions.
She cited Singapore’s Project Guardian, which started in 2022 and by 2024 had reached relatively broad use among financial institutions. In the United Kingdom, she said, tokenized government bonds can already be used as eligible collateral. In the United States, DTCC is pushing ahead with efforts to put U.S. Treasuries on-chain and explore their use as collateral.
On Hong Kong, Ba said the city’s Policy Address and First Five-Year Plan, both released the previous week, laid out several tokenization measures for the next five years, including steps tied to fixed-income asset tokenization:
- First, increasing tokenized bond issuance. This year, the Central Moneymarkets Unit, under the Hong Kong Monetary Authority, is expected to launch a tokenized bond issuance platform to encourage more overseas issuers to issue tokenized bonds there.
- Second, Exchange Fund Bills and Notes, a primary liquidity-management tool of the monetary authority, are also set to move toward tokenization, according to the Policy Address.
- Third, Hong Kong is expected to provide clearer legislative arrangements on whether legal confirmation for tokenized securities is consistent across online and offline settings.
Ba said these moves show that several parts of Asia are pushing ahead quickly with asset tokenization, especially where the underlying assets are traditional financial instruments. She added that HashKey Group is a member of the HKMA’s bond expert group and has participated in related work, including institutional design and technical development.
For offshore RMB use, availability alone is not enough
Near the end of the panel, Ba brought the conversation back to RMB internationalization. She said the digital yuan’s role in that process starts with getting RMB out into overseas use. One side of the task is broader use of the digital yuan in cross-border payment and settlement — solving the “usable” problem. The other side is figuring out how to let more digital yuan stay in offshore markets, enter more asset trading and settlement scenarios, and support more RMB-denominated assets.
Zhao said that if policymakers want the digital yuan, and the RMB more broadly, to be used in more trade settings, there must first be usable products, willing counterparties and a larger set of scenarios. She said the People’s Bank of China has been actively pushing in that direction, from the mBridge project with the central banks of Thailand and the United Arab Emirates and the Hong Kong Monetary Authority, to the more recent launch of the cross-border digital-yuan product CBETS and “CBETS Lifupay.” In her view, wider rollout of CBETS could bring more digital yuan into the offshore market, gradually forming offshore digital-yuan reserve assets or supporting purchases of other RMB-denominated assets.
As use cases increase, she said, the scope and frequency of digital-yuan use should rise as well, giving the currency a stronger base for broader international adoption.
Shan approached the issue from trade structure and asset supply. China’s cross-border trade, he said, still skews toward exports. Those export markets can be roughly divided into two groups. The first includes Europe, the Americas, South America and Southeast Asia, where trade is still mostly priced in U.S. dollars. The second includes countries such as Russia and Iran, where RMB settlement or bilateral currency-swap arrangements play a larger role.
Either way, he said, China still exports more than it imports, which means there are more “money collection” scenarios than outbound payment scenarios in foreign trade, and the money collected is still mainly in dollars. From that perspective, the amount of RMB that has truly flowed into offshore markets is not yet large, at least not in a way that fully matches China’s trade surplus. He said a future task will be finding ways for more RMB to move overseas through current-account trade channels.
He then raised a second question: once RMB is offshore, what can holders do with it? If someone holds dollars, Shan said, there is an obvious route into relatively low-risk U.S. Treasuries, where yields of 4% or 4.5% can be attractive in some periods. For RMB holders, the investable menu remains less developed.
Shan said there may have been too much focus in the past on the “real” side — shipping Chinese goods abroad — and not enough on building a deeper set of convenient RMB investment products and a more complete RMB asset market for global investors.
He added that momentum has picked up in the past two years. He cited public remarks by People’s Bank of China officials in Hong Kong on offshore RMB government bond arrangements, and said public documents also show that Shanghai’s Pudong district has included the development of offshore finance in a series of high-level plans at the national, municipal and district level.
In his view, the policy agenda now has two parts: providing better financial services for China’s real economy and exports, and at the same time giving overseas banks, insurers, securities firms and funds a richer range of RMB assets and a more complete RMB asset market.
Closing focus: stronger currency and market systems
Ba said in her closing remarks that broader overseas use of the RMB will continue to face practical frictions, and some of those pain points can be eased through blockchain-based tools. China has proposed building a strong monetary system and a strong financial market, she said, and making the RMB more usable with technologies such as blockchain could become an important part of that process.