The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) is considering employing a highly scalable blockchain solution in order to further strengthen digital payments. Promoted by 10 banks in India under the aegis of the IBA, NPCI aims to become the “best payments network globally”.
NPCI is basically an umbrella organization for all retail payments in the country. Set up with the guidance and support of the Reserve Bank of India and the Indian Banks Association (IBA), the payment network presently has 56 banks as shareholders. NPCI provides services like cheque clearance and facilitates digital payments.
The network also developed Unified Payments Interface (UPI), instant payment system, whose popularity has grown in leaps and bound, from a Rs 3.1 crore in August 2016 to a whopping Rs 1.33 lakh crore in March 2019. There is no doubt that the digital payment methods have observed an exponential growth in recent times and equally so, the blockchain or distributed ledger is capturing increasing attention day by day. The current incline towards the blockchain is quite understandable, in fact, just yesterday IMF And World Bank have launched a private blockchain to explore the technology.
As per the notification by NPCI:
“NPCI intends to develop a resilient, real time and highly scalable blockchain solution. It is proposed to develop this solution using an open source technology/ framework/solution.”
To achieve the same, NPCI has had floated an Express of Interest (EOI), so that bidders could propose their capability for developing distributed ledger technology/ blockchain in the payment domain. NPCI has invited bids for selection of Liaisoning Consultant (LC) to acquire various End-to-End Statutory permissions for Construction of Captive Data Center (CDC) in Chennai and Hyderabad.
A recent report from the global consultancy firm PwC stated that India would be one of the world’s blockchain leaders by 2023. Innefu Labs Co-Founder Tarun Wig elaborated over the concept of Blockchain and its use cases:
“Blockchain stores information about transactions between users in a way that can be tracked by any user for forever for maximum transparency. This gives visibility which can lead to greater efficiency by automating or confirming transactions and increasing liquidity in the supply chain.”
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