WeChat red envelope
mobile application developed by Chinese technology company Tencent
WeChat red envelope (or WeChat red packet) is a mobile application developed by the Chinese technology company Tencent. The concept, also offered by its market competitors Alibaba and Baidu, is based on the Chinese tradition of hongbao (red envelope, or red packet), where money is given to family and friends as a gift. The application was launched by Tencent in January 2014 and has subsequently gained popularity, with Tencent reporting 2.3 billion transactions on 1 January 2016 alone.
The application offers users the ability to give monetary gifts in the form of virtual "credits" to other users of the application. Money is deposited into a user's WeChat Pay account, which can be used for purchases. The app allows withdrawals from that account. There are two types of "red envelopes" offered by the app: pairwise red packets, in which money is sent in a private chat of two users, and group red packets, in which money is distributed in a group chat. With the latter, after it is posted, the amount of money within is randomly split and assigned to recipients in the group chat.
Since WeChat launched its virtual red envelope campaign in 2014, WeChat Pay has more than doubled its market share.
Timeline
In June 2013, WeChat first enabled mobile payment on its platform.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “WeChat red envelope” as mobile application developed by Chinese technology company Tencent. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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Datasets, specimens, observations and peer-reviewed methods provide the appropriate test for the technical claims summarized here. The source revision retrieved here is dated Mar 17, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q19646485. None of the 2 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2014, 2016 and 2013.
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This entry incorporates text from “WeChat red envelope” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.