The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) has officially announced a blockchain-based payments platform that it says will provide “highly secure and tamper-evident transactions” via a distributed ledger system. Called ‘Vajra’, or lightning, the platform has been designed to automate the process of clearing and settling payments for NPCI transactions.
NPCI claims that the new technology will bring real-time visibility into transactions, thereby reducing disputes and improving back-end operations at banks. The decentralized platform will also help reduce the pain of reconciliation across all the participants, it said. Finally, the ditching the manual process will also help reduce processing errors and bring down the costs for everyone involved. India has recently seen an increase in blockchain based platforms. BSES had recently launched a blockchain platform for solar power trading, and the TRAI is planning to employ blockchain to block spam.
