Exploring the Past and Present of the Renminbi Stablecoin
Written by: Lacie Zhang, Researcher at Bitget Wallet
Introduction: On August 20, 2025, a rumor about "China possibly considering the issuance of a Renminbi stablecoin" reported by Reuters quickly sparked widespread speculation in the global cryptocurrency and financial markets. Although this seems more like a "wild guess," the fact that a topic long regarded as a "taboo" can stir such waves is itself an important policy indicator. This movement is not without reason; it is the inevitable result of years of grassroots exploration and cautious official observation. The Bitget Wallet Research Institute will take you through the past and present of the Renminbi stablecoin.
1. Testing the "Red Line": The Exploration Process of the Renminbi Stablecoin
Before discussing official intentions, we must first understand a basic background: the Renminbi stablecoin is not a new phenomenon; its exploration has been ongoing in the "gray area" of the market for several years. To understand this, it is crucial to distinguish between two core concepts—onshore Renminbi (CNY) and offshore Renminbi (CNH). In short, CNY is the legal currency of mainland China, subject to strict capital controls; while CNH circulates outside of China, with a more market-oriented exchange rate, providing a natural soil for the early exploration of stablecoins.
Based on this, the stablecoins that have truly formed circulation in the market are basically those pegged 1:1 to offshore Renminbi (CNH)—the statistics on Renminbi stablecoins on Coingecko only cover offshore Renminbi (CNH). Looking at its development history, we can see three types of players with different backgrounds, each representing a different attempt.
International Giants' Brief Foray: Stablecoin giant Tether and the American team TrustToken (now renamed Archblock) launched CNHt and TCNH in 2019 and 2022, respectively. They are more like strategic probes into a potential market, aiming to leverage small cross-border payments, but constrained by the regulatory walls of mainland China, they did not invest resources heavily in promotion, resulting in a lukewarm response and gradually fading from mainstream view, with a combined market cap of only a few million dollars.
Mainland Team's Setback: CNHC, founded by a Chinese team, was once seen as the most promising competitor in this field and received investments from star capital such as KuCoin Ventures, members of the Circle founding team, and IDG. However, just as the project was about to take off, its Shanghai office was raided by police in May 2023, and core members were taken away, abruptly halting the project. This became a significant event marking China's stringent regulation of crypto businesses.
Curved Breakthrough under the "Belt and Road" Initiative: After the CNHC incident, AnchorX, a Hong Kong fintech company co-incubated by Conflux and Hongyi Capital, was established, with its core team reportedly having ties to CNHC. They chose a more circuitous path—securing a "fiat stablecoin issuance" license in Kazakhstan in February 2025, focusing on cross-border trade settlement along the "Belt and Road" in Central Asia, and have now initiated sandbox testing.
Offshore Renminbi (CNH) Stablecoin Case Review
Data Source: Coingecko, CoinMarketCap, Token Radar
Although the exploration of the offshore market has experienced ups and downs, attempts at onshore Renminbi (CNY) stablecoins are nearly non-existent. A few projects like LCNY and bitCNY essentially rely on collateralized crypto assets to generate synthetic assets, rather than being backed by real fiat reserves. The logic behind this is clear: under China's strict foreign exchange control system, any stablecoin directly pegged to onshore Renminbi backed by fiat reserves would be tantamount to openly challenging the country's core financial defenses.
Onshore Renminbi (CNY) Stablecoin Case Review
Data Source: Defilama
These varied attempts, with differing outcomes, collectively outline the realistic picture of the development of the Renminbi stablecoin and reveal several clear underlying rules:
"Offshore" is the only path; "onshore" remains a red line. All effective attempts are concentrated in the CNH field, clearly indicating that in the foreseeable future, any official or semi-official projects will be strictly limited to the offshore market to ensure risk isolation from the domestic financial system.
Feasibility has been validated, but scaling is a huge challenge. The technical implementation and small-scale pilot have proven that issuing a Renminbi stablecoin is not difficult. However, the current total market cap of a few million dollars pales in comparison to the hundreds of billions of dollars of dollar stablecoins. Finding real, large-scale application scenarios is key to its potential rise.
The strategic focus is shifting from "globalization" to "geopolitics." If early projects still held a vague vision of serving the global market, AnchorX's establishment in Kazakhstan marks a significant shift in strategic direction: serving specific geopolitical and economic goals such as the "Belt and Road" is becoming the most realistic application scenario for the Renminbi stablecoin.
2. Opportunities and Challenges: Threefold "Interrogation" under the Grand Narrative
In this context, the concept of a Renminbi stablecoin undoubtedly carries enormous strategic opportunities. It not only has the potential to create an independent "Digital Silk Road" for "Belt and Road" trade, reconstructing the regional settlement system; but it can also compete with dollar stablecoins in the global crypto economy, vying for the "right to mint" in the digital age—this is the core driving force behind the official willingness to reassess its possibilities.
However, beneath the grand narrative, three core practical issues loom large, which are not only threefold "interrogations" that must be answered but also key obstacles that must be cleared before the issuance of stablecoins.
First Interrogation: How to balance currency innovation and financial stability?
Even offshore Renminbi stablecoins will ultimately have intricate connections with the onshore system. How to encourage innovation and expand the international influence of the Renminbi while ensuring it does not become a "Trojan horse" for capital outflow, and how to build effective risk isolation and regulatory penetration mechanisms, is a "Damocles' sword" hanging over all practitioners.
Second Interrogation: How to break through the bottleneck of insufficient reserve assets?
A core contradiction lies before us: the potential demand for Renminbi stablecoins is enormous, but qualified reserve assets are extremely scarce. A recent article by Professor Fang Xiang from the University of Hong Kong quantitatively studied this issue: based on a cross-border Renminbi settlement amount of 16 trillion yuan in 2024, assuming only 20% shifts to stablecoin settlement, and referring to the currency circulation rate of dollar stablecoins at 6.8, the required scale of stablecoins would exceed 400 billion yuan. However, the problem is that by the end of 2024, the total amount of available high-quality short-term offshore Renminbi bonds is only a few hundred billion yuan. This supply-demand gap of over ten times is an unavoidable reality bottleneck on the path to developing Renminbi stablecoins. Data Source: People's Bank of China "Financial Statistical Data Report," chart created by the author.
Third Interrogation: How to break the monopoly of dollar stablecoins?
Dollar stablecoins have established a vast user base, deep liquidity, and a mature ecosystem globally after years of development. New offshore Renminbi stablecoins not only have to build user trust from scratch but also face strong network effect barriers. Convincing global users and developers to "abandon the dollar and use the Renminbi" will be an exceptionally challenging battle.
3. "Toleration" and "Expedition": The Future Roadmap of the Renminbi Stablecoin
Regardless of the truth of the rumors, facing such a complex situation, it is foreseeable that the official strategy will not be a simple and crude "full liberalization," but rather a set of cautious and sophisticated "combinations," which can be understood from the following three dimensions.
First, in terms of official attitude, a shift from "strict prohibition" to "toleration first + timely guidance" will be achieved. From the current widespread use of USDT by Yiwu merchants, which is an "open secret" in the industry, to the AnchorX team going to Central Asia to obtain compliance licenses, these seemingly isolated events point to a subtle change in regulatory attitude: the exploration serving national strategy is shifting from strict blocking to observation and even toleration. The recent rumor of deliberation may mark the high-level intention to formally incorporate these "gray explorations" into a more macro and controllable top-level design.
Second, in terms of issuance strategy, the concept of "openly building the road while secretly crossing the river" may emerge. Hong Kong will be the "road" attracting global attention—as an officially recognized pilot, it will conduct limited sandbox testing. The real strategic focus will fall on the "secret crossing" along the "Belt and Road"—encouraging compliant teams to apply for licenses in friendly countries, paving the way for the global "expedition" of the Renminbi through a "single license, serving the world" model.
Finally, in terms of long-term goals, the aim is to build a "new infrastructure for digital finance across borders." Issuing stablecoins is just the first step; the long-term goal of the Chinese government has always been to create a global cross-border payment network independent of SWIFT—only now the technological foundation has shifted from traditional architecture to blockchain. It is foreseeable that in the future, not only will more officially-backed public chains emerge, but they will also be deeply embedded in the trade networks of the "Belt and Road," interfacing with the central banks and commercial banking systems of countries along the route, ultimately forming a regional trade settlement ecosystem centered on the Renminbi, with multi-currency collaboration and high efficiency.
4. Conclusion
As the issuance of Hong Kong dollar stablecoins has been put on the agenda, and as Renminbi offshore stablecoins have quietly piloted in trade scenarios in Central Asia, the re-examination of this field by mainland China is both logical and urgent. Whether the Reuters news is a wild guess or an intentional "leak" from the authorities remains to be seen. However, it is certain that discussions about the Renminbi stablecoin have moved from behind the scenes to the forefront. As for how the final policy will be implemented, especially regarding the clear delineation of the red line between "onshore" and "offshore," it will not only determine the future form of the digital Renminbi but also become an important window for observing China's strategic ambitions in the new round of global financial transformation.
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