Reserve Bank of India Developing Blockchain Banking Platform
In August last year, it was reported that India’s central bank, Reserve Bank of India (RBI), had set up a unit to supervise, oversee its efforts in emerging technologies including cryptocurrency, blockchain and Artificial Intelligence (AI). However RBI denied the reports later, but in April this year, it was announced that National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), which was incorporated by the RBI, is working on to develop highly scalable blockchain based payment solution to further strengthen digital payments in the country. Though the cryptocurrency part was missing in the later report.
Now, in a latest to this, Institute for Development and Research in Banking Technology (IDRBT), an arm of RBI that that exclusively focus on banking technology, is working on the development of a model blockchain platform to cater to the needs of banks.
AS Ramasastri, Director of IDRBT, has told a business daily that IDRBT is working on a model platform for blockchain applications for the government in banking and the same will be documented and developed next year.
The upcoming blockchain platform will put up all available blockchain applications with features like interoperability, among others.
“While there is huge scope for deployment of blockchain applications, a cautious approach is very much needed,” said Ramasastri, pointing at the current situation where despite the fact that banks and financial institutions are doing referring to blockchain technology already but the real deployment of blockchain applications has not been attempted so far.
to recall, an Infosys-Finacle survey report of 2017 had suggested that almost 50% of banks globally have already invested in the blockchain technology or were contemplating to do so in that year.
IDRBT, who is also in the process of setting up a 5G Use Cases Lab for banks, is speeding up its activities of the Fintech Forum launched a few months back with an aim of providing a continuous innovative platform to fintech companies, start-up ventures and banks, in order to enhance the co-innovation and reduce the on-boarding time for new technologies.
In the past, covered various stories on how the technology is invading financial institutions like banks (Read Here) and electronic voting systems in several countries (Read Here), including India. In fact, not only banking and voting but Blockchain is also blurring the lines between technology and nature through a new species called Plantoid, a new digital plant, which is designed to reproduce itself via transactions made on the blockchain.
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