Government is in no hurry to launch Cryptocurrency and would launch it after carefully and cautiously examining all aspects of it, said Reserve Bank of India Governor Shaktikanta Das here on Thursday.
“We do not want to spill out any timeline….we are testing it and announce it accordingly,” the RBI Governor said after announcing the RBI Monetary Policy 2022. “We are proceeding towards it and is in no hurry,” he added
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He, however, confirmed that the Indian Cryptocurrency would be launched in the fiscal year 2022-23 as announced by the Union Finance Minister in her budget speech.
Shaktikanta Das said the RBI is very cautiously examining and plugging in the possibilities of counterfeiting and looking at the cyber security aspect of the digital currency.
Earlier, Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman had announced that RBI would have its own digital currency based on Blockchain Technology. She had said that the digital currency would give a boost to the Indian economy.
India digital currency, or Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) is a legal tender to be issued by the Reserve Bank of India. It would be an electronic record or digital token of a country’s official currency, which fulfils the basic functions as a medium of exchange, unit of account, store of value, and standard of deferred payment.
According to RBI, CBDC is the same as currency issued by a central bank but takes a different form than paper (or polymer). It is sovereign currency in an electronic form and will appear as liability (currency in circulation) on a central bank’s balance sheet. CBDCs should be exchangeable at par with cash.