The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) is getting ready to launch the retail pilot of the “digital currency” after testing the wholesale use of its central bank digital currency (CBDC), which shall be available within a month. As per The Economic Times of India, RBI is in the last stage of preparations for rolling out the retail digital rupee pilot. The banks that will be participating are the State Bank of India, Bank of Baroda, ICICI Bank, Union Bank of India, HDFC Bank, Kotak Mahindra Bank, Yes Bank, and IDFC First Bank. At a later point, all commercial banks will be included in the pilot. The banks will cooperate with the PayNearby and Bankit platforms to integrate the new payment option. Although RBI aims to integrate it with digital banking services, as of now, a special wallet is expected to be downloaded by both the users and the merchants. RBI launched a wholesale segment pilot for the digital rupee on Nov. 1. Its main usage has been the settlement of secondary market transactions in government securities.
Japan’s central bank has begun planning a central bank digital currency (CBDC) trial with the country’s major financial players. The Bank of Japan (BOJ) is working with three megabanks as well as three regional banks in the Asian nation. If everything goes according to plan, BOJ may announce a CBDC in 2026. The trail will inspect how withdrawals and deposits will work with digital yuan. Major financial institutions in the U.S. announced they were working with the Federal Reserve to test a digital currency platform last week. But privacy advocates have raised concerns that CBDC may allow the state to have an eye on citizen’s spending and increase in financial censorship.
Ethereum Software Firm, ConsenSys said it collects few user data
ConsenSys, an Ethereum software firm said that it collects some data of users related to its on-chain wallet service MetaMask. The firm revealed this after Uniswap, the decentralized crypto exchange (DEX) made a similar but nuanced update. The firm says it collects data related to user identification, such as contact details, profile information along with some other user data. ConsenSys also talked about Infura, where they said that while using a default remote procedure call (RPC) provider, on digital wallet MetaMask, it will ask for Ethereum wallet address and IP address for transactions. RPC is a protocol for requesting data and information from a program running on a third-party computer server. The financial information won’t be gathered on MetaMask if a user changes to a different RPC. ConsenSys’s products include the digital wallet MetaMask and the Infura blockchain tool development company.
