The Hong Kong Monetary Authority has launched a pilot programme for a retail central bank digital currency called e-HKD, it said on May 18.

In the next few months, the HKMA and 16 private firms will run a series of pilots to test various use cases for e-HKD. The participants include major banks and technology and payment companies.

The use cases, proposed by the participating firms, include full-fledged payments, offline payments, programmable payments, tokenised deposits, and settling both