Mu Changchun, deputy director of the People’s Bank of China’s payments department, said the development of the coin would help protect the country’s foreign exchange sovereignty as commercial applications of such currencies expanded.

“Why is the central bank still doing such a digital currency today when electronic payment methods are so developed?” said Mu, according to a transcript of a lecture he gave this week that was published online. It is to protect our monetary sovereignty and legal currency status. We need to plan for a rainy day.”

He said the tokens would be as safe as central bank-issued paper notes and could be used even without an internet connection. They could also be used on WeChat and Alibaba-backed Alipay.

China’s central bank set up a research team in 2014 to explore launching its digital currency to cut the costs of circulating traditional paper money and boost policymakers’ control of money supply.

It had said little since but Mu last month announced that the digital currency was almost ready and it is believed that it could go live by 11 November.

Some analysts say China appears to have accelerated the push to the digital money after Facebook announced plans in June to launch digital coin Libra.

Mu said China’s digital currency would strike a balance between allowing anonymous payments and preventing money-laundering. It would also bear some similarities to Libra in design but would not be a direct copy, he said without elaborating.

Facebook’s proposed cryptocurrency has sparked concerns among global regulators that it could quickly become a dominant form of digital payment and a channel for money laundering given the social network’s massive cross-border reach.

Like other cryptocurrencies, Libra transactions will be powered and recorded by a blockchain, which is a shared ledger of transactions maintained by a network of computers.

Mu said the advantage a central bank-issued digital coin had over those issued by WeChat and Alipay was that commercial platforms could, in theory, go bankrupt which could cause users losses. Its ability to be used without an internet connection would also allow transactions to continue in situations in which communications have broken down, such as an earthquake.