NPCI 1.0 is now history
Batua was built ground up for crypto
In December 2004, I was chairing the Furure of Computing session at the iit alumni conclave edition 1 at Pragati maidan. Kris Gopalakrishnan and Deepak Bhagat were on the Dias with me. Deepak demonstrated a smart card which was strung around his neck like a corporate id card. It was a sun microsystems solution. The paradigm was sentient computing. So when he tapped his card to any sun machine – it morphed into his personal desktop. All his files showed up as did his email client etc. I asked him why didn’t he just use a username and password. He asked me “why do we have credit cards in plastic, why not have a user name and password”
That was the day I understood the concept of a secure element. It provides one more layer of authentication. Of course in those days the issue was “what if you forgot your card at home?”. But nowadays no one forgets his smartphone at home. Kids can live without electricity and water and maybe even food. But not without the internet
And then came satoshi and the bitcoin a good five years later in 2009. And the world had changed forever. Few know that bitcoin is an indian invention made by an indian. But that is another story for another day (if one lives to tell it). The bitcoin is probably the greatest and most valuable IT product ever built. So much for India not having product capability.
In five years, bitcoin had changed the world. Legacy fintech leaders like Ashish Talwar and the new breed kids like Shitiz Ruhail were feasting on this. Old world companies like Tech Mahindra were enveloped in bitcoin dreams (none of which actually manifested). My friend CP Gurnani was trying but only to the extent it impacted stock market sentiment. I tried reaching out to bankers like Rana Kapoor and Dipak Gupta and even Shikha Sharma and my favourite role model banker Chanda Kochhar to be told “the RBI will never allow this”. “This is for drug peddlers” said finance minister Chidambaram.
The most positive was my friend the late ashish paul and his friend Dewang Neralla at a company run by Jignesh Shah before the NSEL fiasco. They ran a fintech called Atom. This is now part of NTT.
Ashish was the first to figure out banking was dead. In fact anything which relied on a centralised server working over the internet was dead. The only cyber resilient option was a distributed ledger running a token. Then came this confusion on the encryption. And Jyoti Joglekar came up with a research paper on elliptical curve cryptography which changed everything. Prof Joglekar argued that it was possible to run a really safe system using a secure element on a low power active device like a featurephone. All she needed was a battery and some assurance that it would be carried around. Ethereum caught on immediately and built a platform on that paper. There were no patents.
And then. RBI succumbed. And proposed cbdc in 2017 after demo. Cbdc was launched in December 2022.