Huawei rolls out new smartphone with a built-in hardware wallet for China's digital yuan

Chinese technology giant Huawei has launched a new smartphone that supports a built-in hardware wallet for China's central bank digital currency.

In a press conference on Friday, the firm announced the launch of its Huawei Mate 40 smartphone, among other products. Yu Chengdong, Huawei's CEO for the consumer business group, said on stage that Mate40 is the first smartphone that enables a hardware wallet for China's digital yuan, known as DC/EP.

According to Huawei's Weibo post, Mate40 will deliver hardware-level security with controllable anonymity for digital yuan. As a physical DC/EP wallet, it is also said to be capable of initiating transactions in offline environments.

It's unclear at this stage if the users of Mate40 will be able to directly convert any bank savings into the physical digital yuan wallet. But Yu noted that the feature is a step to expand the usage of digital yuan on the mobile front.

In August, China Construction Bank briefly allowed users to sign up for a digital yuan wallet from within the bank's own mobile app. The Terms and Servers of the wallet indicated that China's digital yuan will also come with physical hardware wallet devices.