The Reserve Bank of India will begin the pilot of its retail central bank digital currency (CBDC) on December 1.

The pilot of the ‘e₹-R’ follows the launch of the pilot phase for the ‘e₹-W’, the wholesale version of the CBDC, in early November.

Today (November 29), the RBI said it would begin testing the retail CBDC with a “closed user group” of consumers and merchants. In contrast to other electronic forms of money, the CBDC will be issued as tokens in the same denominations as paper currency