Five more banks will join the retail central bank digital currency, or e-rupee, pilot project and the project will expand to nine more cities, the Reserve Bank said on Wednesday.
The Reserve Bank of India involved in piloting the Central bank digital currency or E Rupee for private customers at the beginning of December with eight banks in five cities, emphasized that they did not want to rush it, but advocated a slow and steady introduction.
Retail CBDC is now only available to 50,000 users, 5,000 of which are traders. The service is now offered on an invitation-by-invitation basis by eight banks in five cities, Deputy Governor T Rabi Sankar told reporters Wednesday at the usual Post-Police press.
Given the hitch-free adoption so far, five more banks will soon be added to the platform and the number of cities where the pilot service is now available will increase to nine from the current five, Sankar said.
“Having said that and the risk of being right, I just want to reiterate that we want the trial to happen. But we want the process to be gradual and slow. We are in no hurry to make something happen very quickly.
“We have our goals in terms of users, in terms of merchants and all that. But we’re going to go through it slowly because we don’t want to do anything without actually understanding what the possible impacts and those impacts can be,” said the MP governor said.
As for the transaction volume, he said it is slowly increasing and has amounted to around Rs so far. Only 7.7 lakhs.
RBI launched CBDC for wholesale and retail on November 1st and December 1st, 2022 respectively. While the use case of the wholesale CBDC is limited to the settlement of secondary market transactions involving government securities, the retail e-rupee will be tested within a closed user group (CUG) composed of participating customers and dealers.
The first phase includes four banks – State Bank of India, ICICI Bank, Yes Bank and IDFC First Bank, and then four banks, Bank of Baroda, Union Bank of India, HDFC Bank and Kotak Mahindra stepped in bank, at.
The CBDC is expected to make the interbank market more efficient, and e-rupee settlement can reduce transaction costs by anticipating the need for settlement guarantee infrastructure or collateral to mitigate settlement risk.
