A view of the PBC's headquarters in Beijing Photo: cnsphoto

An institution under China's central bank started recruitment for positions in its official digital currency (DC/EP) on Saturday with job vacancies in computing architecture, blockchain engineering, network security engineering, interaction design, finance research and management personnel.

Analysts say the recruitment showed that the central bank will develop a payment tool for its DC/EP, which will likely lead to an application.

The Digital Currency Institute, a main body of the People's Bank of China (PBC), will offer jobs for talent in four categories: digital technology, design, finance and management, according to the institute's job description on its WeChat account. 

The category of digital technology includes cutting-edge technologies of ABCD - artificial intelligence (AI), blockchain, cloud computing and big data.

"Judging from the job description, the central bank is hiring top-caliber professionals, indicating that it wants to develop independent digital currency payment products, not just back-end services," Chen Bo, director of the Finance Research Center at the Institute of Finance and Economics at the Central University of Finance and Economics, told the Global Times on Sunday.

"The digital currency itself is under a trial run. It's time to move on to the second phase, which is product development - the central bank's payment instruments like Alipay and WeChat pay," Chen said.

Another analyst also said that that the central bank is very likely developing a payment tool in the form of an application, as the PBC offers job vacancies for visual designers, interaction designers, multimedia designers and other design-related professionals, Wang Peng, assistant professor of GaoLing School of Artificial Intelligence at Renmin University, told the Global Times on Sunday.

"The applied range of the DC/EP will be broad. The PBC will connect its digital currency with existing payment tools of large Internet companies and banks, which can be concluded from the needs of the system architect, blockchain engineer and other high-tech talent," Wang said.