Indian Central Bank governor says CBDC can kill cryptocurrencies

The governor of reserved bank of India stated that Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDCs) may kill private Cryptocurrencies.

The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) is the Central Bank of India. RBI always showed its stance against crypto as its biggest critic. In the past, RBI imposed a ban on all banks and also ordered Banks to not to provide banking services to the crypto Companies but later Supreme Court dismisses the decision of the crypto & banking ban of RBI.

Recently during a discussion with International Monetary Fund (IMF), the deputy governor of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) Rabi Sankar passed negative comments on Cryptocurrencies. 

Rabi Sankar highlighted the success of India’s popular payment method Unified Payments Interface (UPI) as a successful payment system, which grabbed huge adoption among the citizens by 160% in the last 5 years.

RBI deputy governor noted that the UPI system is very simple to use, unlike blockchain technology.

The Deputy governor added:

“Blockchain, which was introduced six-eight years before UPI started, even today is being referred to as a potentially revolutionary technology. (Blockchain) use cases haven’t been established that much at the speed it initially was hoped for.”

Perhaps the RBI governor noted that huge numbers of Indian citizens are still not able to access the use of UPI payment services due to the non-availability of smartphones. But he confirmed that the goverment is working to fix these challenges through the introduction of offline payment methods. 

Speaking on the stabelcoins use cases in the payment systems, Rabi said that people can’t adopt stable coins like USDT in payment systems blindly. With the appreciation of the digital rupee, Rabi said:

“We believe that central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) could be able to kill whatever little case that could be for private cryptocurrencies.”

Rabi also said that Blockchain technology is only a tool and cannot be used to create a currency. So indirectly, he tried to say that Blockchain technology is reliable and good to use but Cryptocurrencies are not much better to use as currency like fiat. 

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