Digital Rupee

Owned by Vipin Bharathan
Last updated: May 22, 2023
2 min read

This series is a child of the CBDCPalooza Series in Financial Markets SIG.

We kick off the series with a discussion on the technical details of the Digital Rupee from collaborators from Hyperledger India chapter on May 17. People have volunteered their expertise in specific areas of CBDC such as

  • Architecture (including economic design)
  • Laws
  • Technical design
  • Effect on population (wide and friction-free usability versus favoring one group over others), consumer protection

Recording from the call.

Any use case should address many of the overarching topics mentioned in the CBDCPalooza page. Overarching in the sense that they affect every CBDC design.

The G20 -2023 techsprint problem statements are worth reading.

From a search of the rbi website using the word Digital Rupee and CBDC produced only a small number of hits. One of the latest indicates that e-Rupee was demonstrated to the FMCBBG G20 meeting (April 20, 2023).


From https://rbi.org.in/scripts/BS_SpeechesView.aspx?Id=1360

Shaktikanta Das (RBI Governor):
Digital payments have come to stay, and in the last few years, India has made phenomenal progress in the digital payments space. During the last Finance Minister, Central Governors' (FMCBG) G20 meeting at Bangalore, we showcased various aspects of our digital payments including the UPI, and the CBDC. UPI, we had also launched a few days before the Bangalore meeting. We have launched this facility of enabling travelers from foreign countries to also utilise the UPI to make local payments even though they do not have bank accounts in India.

The linkage with Singapore PayNow and RBI's UPI had just been also launched four, five days before the FMCBG G-20 meeting evinced a lot of interest. Now there is the phenomenal success of UPI in a large and populous country like ours has evoked a lot of interest. Going forward, the RBI and the NPCI are already in discussion with a number of countries to have similar arrangements as we have with Singapore and to also enhance the footprint of the UPI.

e-Rupee, our version of the Central Bank digital currency, was seen with a lot of interest. An eminent person from the international financial sector went to the extent of complementing (sic) the design of our CBDC and added that the only thing he missed in the CBDC was the smell of a new currency note.