Yesterday, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) shared information on the developments of its wholesale central bank digital currency (CBDC) trials which began on November 1 last year. The initial use case was to use the wholesale digital rupee to settle government bond transactions, but RBI is willing to test different business models and use cases.

Examples of the planned use cases include money market funds and short-term loans such as demand money.

“We want to have as many use cases as possible. We will test CBDC (central bank digital currency) based on accounts. We hope to launch that. That pilot, it was not intended to steer banks and others away from (the) existing NDS-OM (Negotiated Dealing System – Order Matching) system that is there,” said RBI Deputy Governor T. Rabi Sankar, speaking on the sidelines. of the G20. summit, as reported by Informist.

Since commercial banks already have accounts with the central bank, most wholesale or interbank CBDCs have focused on token-based digital currency, particularly to settle blockchain-based transactions. And the mentioned use cases will use the distributed ledger.

However, the central bank is still in the experimentation phase. “Everything will change,” Sankar said. “There are various technologies that we want to test, various business models that we want to test.”

Initial issues with the CBDC trial have been ironed out, but Informist reported that volumes on the wholesale pilot have dropped since launch. There were no transactions from Monday to Wednesday this week, followed by seven on Thursday.

As for India’s digital retail rupee trials, we reported earlier this month that there were 50,000 end-users on the program. Next quarter the goal is to reach 500,000 and expand the current eight banks to most of the major ones.

Meanwhile, at yesterday’s G20 Central Bank Deputy Governors meeting, crypto assets were discussed in a closed-door session. CBDCs did not get much airtime, according to Money Control. A key topic of conversation is the link between Singapore’s PayNow digital payment system and India’s UPI, which was unveiled earlier this week.