Retail CBDC adoption: Long winding road to 1 million transactions

Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) is a digital form of currency notes issued by a central bank. RBI broadly defines e-Re as the legal tender issued by a central bank in digital form

The testing of the retail segment of the central bank digital currency (CBDC), which started in December last year, is progressing at a slow pace, even though the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has set an ambitious target of 1 million transactions by the end of this year.

According to sources familiar with the retail segment of CBDC, 3.5 million merchants and 1 million users or customers have been selected for the pilot; daily transactions are only in the range of 10,000 to 12,000.

“Awareness is still lacking. We need to make people aware that this is different from the Unified Payments