iSPIRT wants in on India’s digital rupee

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Editor's note: The Indian Software Product Industry Roundtable, or iSPIRT, has ambitious plans for the Reserve Bank of India’s digital currency project. The technology think tank wants to build a blockchain platform for the central bank’s digital currency. The platform that the Bengaluru-based organization is working on is called Bharat Distributed Ledger—or BADAL—and it is likely to present the plan to the RBI. The idea is to build a ready-to-use blockchain infrastructure that can be integrated with India Stack. Since its inception in 2013, iSPIRT has played an active role in building key digital platforms for the government. In 2016, it launched India Stack as part of the government’s Startup India initiative.  India Stack is a set of free, open-source application programming interfaces, or APIs, developed by iSPIRT. These APIs include services that enable companies and regulators to verify a person’s identity against the Aadhaar database. This forms the basis of most digital transactions in India, including Aadhaar, the Unified Payments Interface, the Open Network for Digital Commerce and the Central Know Your Customer repository.  In a blog post published in January, …