China’s central bank: e-CNY transactions totaled ~$14B from December 2019 to August 2022, up 14% from ~$12.2B in December 2021, signaling slowing growth (Coco Feng/South China Morning Post)

Jennifer Conrad / Wired:
As China encourages digital yuan adoption among its citizens, experts say the digital currency opens up new forms of government surveillance and social control  —  Government officials are urging citizens to adopt the official digital currency in a bid to gain more control over the economy.

Harry McCracken / Fast Company:
In an interview, Zoom CEO Eric Yuan details the company’s decision to rebrand Zoom Chat as Team Chat, seeking to better compete with Slack, Teams, and others  —  It’s nice to be synonymous with a product category.  But Zoom CEO Eric Yuan says that expanding on its video-calling ubiquity is both an opportunity and a challenge.

Manish Singh / TechCrunch:
The European Central Bank says that bitcoin is “rarely used for legal transactions” and is on the “road to irrelevance”, without citing any strong data points  —  European Central Bank officials alleged on Wednesday that bitcoin is “rarely used for legal transactions …

Coco Feng / South China Morning Post:
Alipay has quietly started testing money transfers through WeChat in September, available for a small number of users with a maximum of ~$278 per transfer  —  The wall separating China’s two leading mobile payment systems may have started to crack after Ant Group’s Alipay rolled out a trial service …

Coco Feng / South China Morning Post:
Sources: ByteDance CFO told staff that it has no plans to go public; report: CEO Liang said the company plans to reduce input into noncore businesses  —  TikTok ‘s parent company ByteDance , the world’s most valuable unicorn, has no plans to go public, its chief financial officer told employees …

Bloomberg:
Nigeria’s central bank slashes the daily ATM withdrawal limit from ~$337/day to ~$45/day in a bid to boost digital payments and eNaira digital currency adoption  —  Nigeria’s central bank slashed the daily withdrawal limit from automatic teller machines in a bid to boost digital payments in Africa’s most-populous nation.