Huawei has announced that its forthcoming Mate40 smartphone series will include an integrated hardware wallet for China’s central bank digital currency, the digital yuan.
This will be the first smartphone to feature such a wallet, according to an official Huawei post on Chinese microblogging website Weibo on Oct. 30.
The post also promises that users will be able to control and protect their anonymity and perform dual offline transactions. These enable mobile phone users to transfer funds simply by touching their devices together, even if both are offline.
“#HuaweiMate40# series is the first smartphone that supports digital RMB hardware wallet, hardware-level security, controllable anonymity protection, dual offline transactions, bringing a new safe and convenient payment experience.”
Huawei is also offering a free Mate40 Pro to the Weibo user who forwards the post to the most people.
The Mate40 is the first Huawei smartphone to utilize 5nm chip technology, as recently debuted on Apple’s iPhone 12. The technology allows billions more transistors to be packed onto a single chip, significantly increasing the potential power.
However, due to the ongoing trade war between the United States and China, Huawei will be unable to acquire or make more of its Kirin 9000 processors once its current stockpile runs out.
China’s digital yuan is reportedly already in the testing stages, as several countries vie to be the first to launch a CBDC.
As Cointelegraph reported, one of the major drivers behind China’s accelerated development of its digital currency is to act against the influence of the U.S. dollar in global trade.