India will introduce a digital currency backed by the Reserve Bank of India as phase of a broader technique to discourage internal most cryptocurrencies lacking sovereign or asset backing, Union Minister of Commerce and Commercial Piyush Goyal presented on Monday.
The “RBI-assured” digital currency objectives to simplify transactions, decrease paper consumption, and enable quicker, traceable payments when when put next with ragged banking programs, Goyal said in the route of discussions in Doha on Monday, in step with an ANI report.
The minister clarified that whereas India hasn’t imposed an outright ban on crypto without central government backing, authorities are taxing them heavily to discourage reveal, “because we don’t desire someone to be stuck sooner or later with a cryptocurrency that has no backing and no person on the backend.”
Goyal’s announcement comes as India, Pakistan, and Vietnam lead global crypto reveal, in step with Chainalysis’s 2025 World Adoption Index, which displays the Asia-Pacific station recording a 365 days-over-365 days enhance in transaction quantity from $1.4 trillion to $2.36 trillion.
Raj Kapoor, founder and CEO of the India Blockchain Alliance, told Decrypt that “Goyal’s suppose claim simply reiterates that the government continues to realizing a CBDC as a core plank of its fintech device.”
“The reference to ‘backed by RBI guarantee’ is gargantuan and no longer rhetorical as it seeks to distinction the deliver-issued digital currency as having superior legitimacy and security when when put next with ‘unbacked’ cryptos,” Kapoor said, calling out “speculative tokens, meme coins, or ephemeral DeFi constructs lacking anchoring resources.”
He said India is susceptible to undertake “a hybrid regulatory framework” combining monetary and securities oversight, requiring crypto issuers to have “verifiable fiat or commodity reserves in regulated custody and undergo traditional third-social gathering audits.”
The minister’s remarks mark “a transparent pivot against stricter oversight,” Kapoor added, signaling India’s shift from a “tax-and-tolerate” solution to “a tiered compliance regime that favors regulated, asset-backed tokens over volatile, unbacked ones.”
“India’s conception for an RBI-backed digital rupee displays particular intent to merge have confidence with technology, identical to a deliver-assured stablecoin,” Monica Jasuja, chief growth and innovation officer at Rising Funds Association Asia, told Decrypt.
“It signals self perception in regulated digital money over speculation, and for fintechs, the message is particular—originate with the deliver, no longer out of doors it,” Jasuja added.
She said that if India backs an RBI-issued digital rupee over internal most stablecoins, investors would possibly perhaps additionally seek for it as “a safer but narrower play,” with “self perception transferring against compliance-aligned ventures” and far from speculative, crypto-native initiatives.
The RBI has already piloted the digital rupee in every retail and wholesale segments, giving India a head birth in CBDC implementation.
On the different hand, change observers have recently warned that regulatory uncertainty has created a bureaucratic stalemate, with an estimated 80-85% of India’s top crypto skill already relocated internationally, whereas the nation struggles to attach particular frameworks for internal most cryptocurrencies.
The change has additionally, for some time, considered central bank digital currencies with a degree of skepticism, arguing that they switch far from crypto’s core thesis by handing the monetary reins to a centralized authority working on permissioned blockchains.
“A lot has to be addressed,” Kapoor said, questioning how India intends to “calibrate privacy versus surveillance in a CBDC and in ‘authorized’ token lessons” to have particular person have confidence.
“Will the regulatory burden for token issuers be low ample to enable unswerving competitors, or will it prefer incumbents?” he said. “How will India deal with international stablecoins or fallacious-border token flows that don’t meet its ‘asset-backed’ principles?”
