Sources familiar with the matter said that the architects of the retail CBDC are working to incorporate offline transactions and are targeting half a million users by July.
India is one of the major global economies that has been testing its central bank digital currency (CBDC), also known as digital Rupee. According to the latest reports, the architects of the Central Bank of India Retail Digital Currency (CBDC-R) are aiming to scale the user base of the digital rupee to one million users.
Sources familiar with the matter also told the CoinDesk publication that the architects have prioritized solving the challenges of creating an offline version.
Last month, in March, RBI officials said they plan to onboard half a million users by July, in the CBDC pilot project. RBI CEO Ajay Kumar Choudhary saying:
“In the near user group, right now, there are almost 90,000 customers and almost 9,000 merchants and our goal is to scale to half a million by June-July of this year. We’re going to test multiple technology architectures, multiple design features, multiple use cases, including the offline program, we’re in no rush to implement. Once we feel comfortable and confident in all aspects, including cyber security and technology architecture, we will only roll it out at the population level.”
One of the sources too said CoinDesk that reaching half a million users will not be difficult considering the huge population of India.
Indian CBDC Pilot Projects
The central bank of India, also known as the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), is piloting both retail and wholesale CBDCs. The CBDC retail pilot is currently active in 15 cities in India with 13 banks participating.
India’s RBI began pilot testing for its retail CBDC on December 1, 2022, and in four months since then, it has seen more than 100,000 customers. Furthermore, during the latest meeting of all G20 finance ministers in Bangalore, RBI Governor Shaktikanta Das said that “an eminent person from the international financial sector went so far as to compliment the design of our CBDC, adding that he The only thing that got lost in the CBDC was the smell of the new currency.”
The central bank of India is also running a few hackathons this year to unlock the solutions to the challenges surrounding a retail CBDC. This includes finding solutions to improve scalability, increase transactions per second, and enable offline transactions.
One of the sources said:
“This is almost an impossible trinity. As in the date, you can achieve two goals but not the third. Hopefully some technological innovation will address this soon.”
If CBDC can facilitate offline transactions, it would be a game changer leading to greater financial inclusion, especially for emerging economies like India.
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Bhushan is a FinTech enthusiast and has a good knack for understanding financial markets. His interest in economics and finance draws his attention to the new emerging markets of Blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies. He is continuously in a learning process and stays motivated by sharing the knowledge he has acquired. In his spare time, he reads thrillers and sometimes explores his culinary skills.
