Yesterday, the Reserve Bank of India unveiled its second global hackathon, Harbinger 2023. The event has a four-pronged approach, including use cases for its retail central bank digital currency (CBDC) and on-chain scalability. of blocks. The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) is supporting the hackathon.

Registration begins February 22 and proposals must be submitted by March 24. The first prize is 4 million rupees ($48,000), and the winners will be announced in mid-August. While the hackathon invites global participants, including individuals, there is a preference for those who are familiar with the Indian financial services sector and consumers.

India began its retail CBDC pilot program at the end of November 2022, and as of early February, it had executed 770,000 transactions. This followed the launch of a wholesale CBDC pilot in October.

For the hackathon, the mentioned CBDC use cases include disbursement of social benefits and offline access to CBDCs. Offline CBDCs are considered to address accessibility and financial inclusion because some regions are remote and have poor communications or electrical connectivity. Most CBDC solutions connect back to a network to prevent fraud or double spending, but offline CBDC wallets have to authenticate the digital currency in other ways, usually cryptographically.

The BIS Innovation Hub has just launched Project Polaris, which is also exploring CBDC offline.

Blockchain scalability is also one of the central bank of India hackathon topics. He notes that this is one of the challenges for broader adoption in use cases, such as a retail CBDC. However, the central bank also emphasized that transactions per second (TPS) are not the only determinant of scalability. The speed at which payments are considered final is also critical.