The high-quality development of digital finance is crucial for driving economic transformation and enhancing the quality and efficiency of finance in serving the real economy. As China enters the new phase of the 15th Five-Year Plan, exploring the characteristics, development opportunities, and challenges of digital finance development is of great theoretical value and practical significance for exploring pathways toward its high-quality development. Over more than two decades of rapid development, China’s digital finance has formed distinct characteristics of consumption orientation and inclusive finance. From the perspective of its endogenous evolution and changing external conditions, China’s digital finance will face development opportunities, such as the deepening transformation from consumer finance to industrial finance, the accelerated digitalization of financial institutions, the strengthened role of digital finance as a strategic hub in multi-dimensional finance, and the enhanced role of digital currency in cross-border payments. In the future, we should increase investment in underlying cutting-edge technologies such as AI large models, build a unified digital finance infrastructure, strengthen strategic connection hubs, and further enhance the practicality of digital currency in cross-border payments. Additionally, the development of digital finance in China will face three major challenges: the initial development predicament of industrial digital finance, the lagging system of digital production relations, and the absence of innovative supervision. In response, support for the digital transformation of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the industrial chain should be strengthened. We should actively explore a scientific and reasonable system for establishing data element property rights, promote the smooth flow of factor resources on a larger scale, build a dual-dimensional regulatory system of “technology + law”, and continuously improve the digitalization level of supervision by regulatory authorities.