G20 Summit 2023: RBI Working On New Design Features For Retail CBDC

The Reserve Bank of India is working on various design features for the retail central bank digital currency, so that it can gauge public behaviour under the pilot programme.

“As you are aware, our target is to reach 1 million transactions per day by December. With this volume we will be able to understand the behaviour of the public and then we can decide on the design features,” said AK Choudhary, executive director at RBI. Choudhary was speaking on the sidelines of the G20 Summit 2023 in New Delhi.

The central bank is mulling various design features currently, he said. These include offline CBDC, programming it for specific payments and cross-border transactions.

“Multiple ways we are looking at it, which can strengthen, improve, enhance, increase efficiencies, all those factors,” Choudhary said.

According to him, there are certain challenges for offline digital payments that the regulator is looking to solve.

“As you know the technology challenges with offline CBDC is how to ensure there is no double spending. You have to connect to the system to update at some frequency,” Choudhary said, adding that once the RBI is satisfied with the outcomes, it can go ahead and introduce these payments on the CBDC.

Currently, the retail CBDC is undergoing pilot trials which began in December 2022. The regulator has created a cohort of 1.5 million users and testing the efficacy of CBDC payments before a full-scale launch. Recently the central bank made CBDC payments compatible with QR-codes on the unified payment interface.