Tencent rumored to be forming a team to research digital currency.

iFeng, a Chinese media platform, has recently announced, that Tencent the Chinese giant has released an internal statement notifying its employees that the company needs a head for a new cryptocurrency research team. Tencent’s team will be investigating possible ways of integrating the blockchain technologies and cryptocurrency in its payment system. It will also determine the ways of correlating the cryptocurrencies with regulatory regimes.

The People’s Bank of China (PBOC) has almost finished researching and developing the strategy of implementing the digital yuan and expects Tencent to be their first partner in issuing this cryptocurrency.

Tencent has neither confirmed the cryptocurrency research rumors, nor provided any additional insight about the team. It has not given any comments to Chinese media as well. The questions as to whether the team will try to develop a new cryptocurrency, or will be working to support digital yuan, remains.



Tencent’s WeChat Pay is one of the most popular world’s payment platforms with more than 900 million active users. However, outside of China it faces numerous issues, being recently banned in Nepal.

Tencent always was an active player in research of the cryptocurrency industry. Recently it has published a whitepaper describing Facebook’s Libra project as a threat to numerous payment platforms, including WeChat Pay. It may even become a private alternative to digital yuan.

In October Tencent has received a license to open a virtual bank to provide services using blockchain. This month WeBank became the first to provide infrastructure for vast China’s national blockchain network.