WeChat adds photos to its popular red envelope-giving service

Tencent's WeChat, the social-networking app, is launching an upgrade to its popular service that lets users exchange virtual packets of digital cash in red envelopes (hongbao), tailored for the Chinese New Year. Users will be able to upload a private photo that will automatically be blurred to encourage others in their social circle to send a red envelope to make the picture clearly viewable. A one-hour trial earlier this week saw 18 million users join in. Launching on 7 February, the money exchanged over the Spring Festival is estimated to run into billions of yuan. These virtual digital cash packets can be used to make online payments via WeChat for booking cinema tickets, topping up phones or even buying financial products.  

Some 20 million red envelopes were sent via WeChat over the first two days of the Lunar New Year in late January 2014. This jumped to 1 billion for last year’s Spring Festival and 1.4 billion on August 20 2015, dubbed Chinese Valentine’s Day. Photo: SCMP Pictures