The outstanding amount for Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) in the wholesale segment crashed while its usage in the retail segment climbed 39 times in the past year, data from the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) showed.
In the wholesale segment, the outstanding amount stood at ₹8 lakh in March 2024, from ₹10.6 crore last year, and in the retail segment, the amount climbed to ₹234 crore in March 2024, from ₹6 crore last year.
India’s CBDC, the Digital Rupee (e₹), is a digital form of its official currency, introduced after the FY23 budget.
The pilots for CBDC retail and wholesale were introduced in 2022, allowing retail users to make person-to-merchant transactions after scanning UPI QR codes from the CBDC app, making it widely accessible. The objective for the wholesale segment was to facilitate secondary market transactions in government securities for select banks while reducing transaction costs.
The central bank has been pushing for the use of CBDC by continuously expanding its pilot projects to give more services and instruments using the e₹.
“Going forward, other instruments like commercial papers and certificates of deposits will be tried out in the pilots along with securities tokenisation features,” RBI governor Shaktikanta Das said during an interaction at BIS Innovation Summit 2024, at Basel, Switzerland.
