The Quiet Death of a Digital Currency Experiment On January 1, 2026, China quietly buried the e-CNY as it was originally conceived. The People's Bank of China formally reclassified the digital yuan from an M0 instrument — the digital equivalent of physical cash — into an interest-bearing deposit. Wallet balances began accruing interest. Commercial banks were authorised to hold e-CNY as a balance-sheet liability and use it for credit creation. The PBoC simultaneously incorporated digital yuan operations into its reserve requirement framework. This was not a technical upgrade. It was a fundamental redesign that concedes the original model did not work. The numbers made the problem impossible to ignore. The PBoC reported that the e-CNY had handled cumulatively almost 3.5 billion transactions totalling 16.7 trillion yuan as of November 2025 — figures that sound large until you compare them to the daily transaction volumes flowing through WeChat Pay and…