RBI launches digital currency retail sandbox

The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) on Wednesday launched a retail sandbox for its central bank digital currency (CBDC), allowing fintech firms to build and test solutions as part of the ongoing pilot, Suvendu Pati, chief general manager at the Reserve Bank of India, said.

The RBI's first retail e-rupee pilot, its version of a CBDC, began on December 1, 2022.

Total CBDC users in India are about 7 million.


Earlier, Pati had said that the pilot will employ the wholesale segment of its central bank digital currency (CBDC) as the underlying layer for the exercise. The RBI is collaborating with “a few banks” on the project.

Digital tokenisation is known to make transactions faster, cheaper, and safer. Tokenisation, in a financial context, refers to representing a real-world financial asset in digital form (a “token”) on a secure ledger (often blockchain or distributed ledger technology). In case of deposit tokenisation, deposits held at banks would be represented as tokens, which can then be used, transferred, or settled more fluidly across systems.