China's securities regulator to hire former central bank digital currency head

Asia • December 11, 2019, 11:57AM EST
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The China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC) may soon appoint former People's Bank of China (PBOC)'s digital currency research head to helm a new department it is forming. 

According to a report by Chinese financial news site Caijing, the CSRC is setting up a new technology regulation division with the aim to deploy some latest technologies, including AI, cloud computing, and big data, to better inform its data analytics effort. 

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Citing sources close to the regulator, Caijing said an appointment announcement had been published on the CSRC's internal bulletin, naming Qian Yao as the director.

Yao is not an unfamiliar name among the Chinese cryptocurrency community. He was the founding member of the PBOC's digital currency research institute and had been in the post until Oct. 2o18. He was also nominated by CoinDesk as one of the most influential figures in blockchain in 2017. Most recently, Yao was the deputy secretary of the communist party committee at the China Security Depository and Clearing Corporation. 

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Celia joined The Block as a reporter after earning her BA in the History of Science from the University of Chicago. Having spent years pondering over why 2+2 cannot equal 5, she is interested in the history and philosophy of mathematics, computation, and cryptography. She also had a very brief stint at Crunchbase News.

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