The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) is planning to introduce wholesale a central bank digital currency (CBDC) in the call money market, an official said on Tuesday. He also said that India aims to make UPI and other digital products acceptable in a large number of countries. All these products will be showcased during the G20 leadership summit.
“RBI is now planning to go interbank borrowing market, specifically call money market,” the official said.
CBDC is a digital rupee, announced in the FY23 Budget. As of date, two pilot projects – one for CBDC (Retail) and the other for CBDC (Wholesale) are going on. As of date, CBDC-W is being used as a pilot in settling trade in the government securities market.
The pilots started in four cities and four banks. These have now been expanded to 13 banks and 26 locations, with nearly 20 lakh million users and merchants on board. The RBI is targeting 10 lakh transactions per day in the retail CBDC segment by December.
“Based on the experience gained, different use cases and technical architecture will be tested in future pilots. Features like offline usage to provide resilience and availability in the absence of network and programmability i.e., tying the use of funds to specific use cases are also being considered,” the official said.
