Over 50,000 Retail Digital Rupee Users In India Now, More Than 5,000 Merchants On Board: RBI

A total of eight banks have been identified for the first e₹-R pilot.

RBI said that e₹-R will be issued by banks in the same denominations as the fiat rupee.

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Reserve Bank of India (RBI) Deputy Governor T Rabi Sankar said that there are currently over 50,000 retail central bank digital currency (CBDC) users in India. Speaking at the RBI Monetary Policy press conference on Wednesday, Sankar said that the banking regulator is taking it slow when it comes to deploying Digital Rupeer for retail (e₹-R) within the country, to fully understand the various aspects of the overall process before taking decisions.

Sankar added that over 5,000 merchants in the country are participating in the Digital Rupee pilot project. A total of eight banks have been identified for the first e₹-R pilot, namely, State Bank of India, ICICI Bank, Yes Bank, IDFC First Bank, Bank of Baroda, Union Bank of India, HDFC Bank, and Kotak Mahindra Bank. The pilot is currently being implemented in five cities. 

Sankar added that there are plans to accommodate even more banks and cities within the pilot gradually. Speaking on the number of transactions, the deputy governor added that so far, there have been roughly 7.7 lakh small-value transactions. 

“We want the process to happen gradually and slowly,” said Sankar. “We have our targets in terms of users and merchants… We don’t want to do something without fully understanding what the actual process is.”

When the pilot was announced on December 1, the RBI said that e₹-R will be issued by banks in the same denominations as the fiat rupee is currently issued in paper currency and coins. 

The announcement came a month after the RBI launched the Digital Rupee for wholesale (e₹-W) in India on November 1. The newly launched e₹-R and the e₹-W are two variants of India's own CBDC. 

For those unaware, a CBDC is a digital coin issued by a nation's central bank — RBI in this case — and carries the same value as its fiat counterpart. Unlike cryptocurrencies, CBDCs aren't anonymous and their values don't fluctuate either (in relation to a country's fiat currency). 

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