CBDC can kill crypto: RBI deputy governor tells IMF
RBI deputy governor spoke about CBDCs and their potential to disrupt the crypto environment at an IMF discussion
T Rabi Sankar, deputy governor of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) discussed India's possible position in bringing change in the crypto environment with the help of central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) at an International Monetary Fund (IMF) discussion.
During the discussion with the IMF, Sankar spoke about India's in-house peer-to-peer fiat payments system, UPI (Unified Payments System), quoting its success to the simplicity of the system's operation. He mentioned that UPI had seen 160 percent average adoption and transaction growth per annum in the last five years. He compared UPI and blockchain technology, stating that UPI has had significant growth, and blockchain has still not managed to establish itself and is still termed an up-and-coming feat.
“Blockchain, which was introduced six-eight years before UPI started, even today is being referred to as a potentially revolutionary technology. [Blockchain] use cases haven’t really been established that much at the speed it initially was hoped for.”
While UPI has been a huge success amongst masses in India, RBI issued a statement about how a large percentile of the Indian population still cannot access UPI due to the unavailability of the required devices. The Government of India is taking action to tackle this problem. Offline platforms are slowly being introduced to the Indian population to increase accessibility.