Digital RMB cross-border payment has the advantages of second-level arrival and handling fee reduced to 1/10 of the traditional model, painting a picture of efficient and convenient global payments.
However, its road to globalization is far from smooth, and is intertwined with multiple risks such as institutional constraints, market inertia, and technical barriers.
To see the whole picture clearly, we need to dismantle it from the three core perspectives of financial regulators, market participants, and technical engineers.
From the perspective of financial regulators, compliance and risk control are the primary problems.
For regulators responsible for financial stability, the biggest challenge in the cross-border use of digital renminbi is how to balance efficiency and security.
The “invisible wall” of the capital account: The current cross-border pilot projects for digital renminbi are mainly focused on current accounts such as trade settlement, and free convertibility under the capital account is still strictly controlled.
This means that even if international investors hold digital renminbi, it is difficult for them to freely invest in capital markets such as China’s stock market and bond market, which fundamentally limits its appeal as an international reserve and investment currency.
The dilemma of cross-border coordination of anti-money laundering (AML): In cross-border transactions, the identification standards for non-resident users are different, and the risk of anonymous transactions increases.
To further complicate matters, anti-money laundering and counter-terrorism financing regulations vary across countries.
For example, the EU has strict GDPR data privacy regulations, while China requires localized storage of key data, which may cause cross-border digital renminbi transactions to face regulatory conflicts over cross-border data transmission.
The Financial Action Task Force (FATF), an international anti-money laundering organization, also emphasized the need to strengthen relevant cross-border supervision of digital renminbi.
Challenges of “disintermediation” in fund monitoring: Digital RMB point-to-point transactions bypass traditional agency banks, making it difficult for regulatory agencies to track the entire flow of funds through intermediate links as in the past.
Transactions in the offshore market may be outside the scope of domestic supervision, making it more difficult to monitor abnormal capital flows, illegal arbitrage and even capital flight.
From the perspective of the market and users, breaking the dollar network effect is the biggest obstacle.
For international traders, investors and ordinary users, the core of choosing a currency lies in whether it is easy to use and worth holding.
From this perspective, the digital RMB faces the strong lock-in effect of the US dollar system that has been formed for more than half a century.
Severely underestimated true share and unshakable pricing power: SWIFT data shows that in February 2026, RMB global payments accounted for only 2.74%.
But Ding Shuang, an economist at Standard Chartered Bank, pointed out that there is a statistical blind spot.
If transactions settled through the China Cross-Border Payment System (CIPS) and bilateral agreements are included (such as 46% of Russian oil exports to China), the actual payment ratio in RMB is close to 10%, making it the third largest payment currency in the world.
However, RMB-denominated goods account for only about 3% of global trade, and the U.S. dollar has formed an insurmountable network moat by virtue of its pricing hegemony in commodities such as oil.
Infrastructure scale gap: As the main road for RMB cross-border payments, CIPS will process 175 trillion yuan in 2024, with a significant growth rate.
However, compared with the established giant SWIFT, its annual processing volume is only about 1/70 of the latter (SWIFT processes approximately 1,800 trillion U.S. dollars annually).
SWIFT’s breadth of coverage and trust foundation connecting 11,000 financial institutions around the world will be difficult to replace in the short term.
Insufficient asset pool depth and limited holding willingness: International investors holding a currency need an asset pool with sufficient depth and liquidity for allocation and hedging.
As of the end of 2025, RMB assets held overseas will exceed 10 trillion yuan.
But compared to the U.S. dollar, global official U.S. dollar foreign exchange reserves alone exceed $7 trillion.
There is a huge gap between the scale and richness of instruments in the RMB bond and stock markets, resulting in limited value-added and hedging channels for holding digital RMB.
From the perspective of a technical architect, stability, compatibility and standards are the three major hurdles.
Technology is the cornerstone of the vision for cross-border payments, but engineers see another set of real-world risks.
System stability and cutting-edge threats: The cross-border network environment is complex and unstable links may cause transaction delays or interruptions.
In the longer term, the development of quantum computing poses a potential threat to existing blockchain encryption algorithms and may endanger the foundation of transaction security.
Cross-border compatibility problems: The technical architecture and ledger models used by central bank digital currencies (CBDC) in various countries may be different.
How the “hybrid architecture” of the digital renminbi can efficiently and cost-effectively connect with different systems to achieve true interoperability is a huge engineering challenge.
There is currently a lack of unified CBDC interoperability standards globally.
The passive situation of lacking the right to speak about standards: In the formulation of technical standards, whoever leads the rules will have the initiative.
At present, my country’s voice in the formulation of global CBDC technical standards still needs to be improved.
Without leadership, cross-border digital renminbi may face the situation of passively adapting to other countries’ standards, increasing system transformation costs and even affecting the independence of technical routes.
Integrated judgment: Technological advantages cannot match the inertia of the system and network, and the road to globalization is long and difficult.
Based on the analysis of the above three dimensions, we can draw a clear judgment: in the field of cross-border payments, digital renminbi shows a strong contrast between sharp technical strengths and deep institutional and market weaknesses.
Its technical efficiency advantages are real. In the multilateral central bank digital currency bridge (mBridge), digital renminbi settlement accounts for 95.3%.
But this is more like excellent results run within the framework of specific “experimental corridors” or bilateral agreements.
Once it is promoted to globalization and large-scale application, the real bottleneck will immediately appear:
The fundamental constraint lies in the system: capital account management is the core gate of RMB internationalization.
Researcher Zhang Jianhua of Tsinghua University pointed out that the core challenge is not technology, but the construction of a rules system and trust mechanism that is widely accepted by the world.
In the context of the capital account not being fully open, it is difficult for the digital renminbi to achieve the critical leap from “cross-border settlement tool” to “international reserve asset”.
The biggest opponent is inertia: After decades of construction, the U.S. dollar system has formed a complete ecological closed loop of pricing, settlement, reserves, and financing, and the conversion cost is extremely high.
Digital RMB must not only provide better technical solutions, but also overcome the path dependence of the entire ecosystem, which is bound to be a long process.
The nature of risks is intertwined and superimposed: technical risks may exacerbate regulatory risks (such as encryption vulnerabilities leading to money laundering), and insufficient market acceptance will in turn affect the promotion of technical standards.
These risks do not exist in isolation, but are interrelated and mutually reinforcing.
Therefore, although the digital renminbi provides an exciting new solution for solving the pain points of cross-border payments, its path to globalization is by no means a simple promotion of technology.
It is a complex systematic project involving in-depth financial reform, international rules game, and rebuilding trust in the global market.
In the short term, it is more likely to be deeply applied in specific regions and scenarios such as the “Belt and Road Initiative” and peripheral trade. However, it still requires time and strategic patience to challenge the global dominance of the US dollar.
