E-rupee worth ₹234.12 crore was in circulation as of March 2024, compared with ₹16.3 crore a year earlier, according to RBI data.
“The multi-fold jump could be due to a few big banks pushing CBDC wallets among their employees,” said a senior banker. “The rise in CDDC transactions could be because the banking regulator has allowed interoperability between CBDC and Unified Payments Interface,” the same person said.
Data show the CBDC circulation was almost entirely in the retail segment, even as wholesale fell sharply to near nil – of the e-rupee circulation, ₹234.04 crore was retail and ₹8 lakh was wholesale. The rise in retail transactions is partly because the RBI has widened the user segment by allowing non-bank payment system operators to offer CBDC wallets.
In the April monetary policy, the RBI governor said: “The CBDC pilots are currently operating with increasing use-cases and participating banks. It is proposed to make CBDC-Retail accessible to a broader segment of users by enabling non-bank payment system operators to offer CBDC wallets. This will also facilitate testing of the resiliency of the CBDC platform to handle multi-channel transactions.”
CBDC is the same as currency issued by a central bank but in electronic form, and it would appear as a liability (currency in circulation) on a central bank’s balance sheet.CBDCs are classified based on usage, such as wholesale (CBDC-W) and retail (CBDC-R).According to the latest Currency and Finance Report, retail users of the e-rupee rose to 5 million as of the end of June from 1.3 million a year earlier. The report said 420,000 merchants were participating in the CBDC retail pilot. The initial use cases for the pilot of CBDC-R included person-to-person (P2P) and person-to-merchant (P2M) transactions.
The circulation was highest for ₹500 CBDC notes at ₹1,643 crore, followed by ₹200 notes at ₹32 crore and ₹100 at ₹20.73 crore.
