Mumbai: The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) is exploring gold tokenization for its Unified Markets Interface (a platform that settles tokenized financial instruments using central bank digital currency), P Vasudevan, executive director of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) said at the Global Fintech Fest.
“There were some discussions yesterday. We were looking at gold tokenization as one more avatar that is being explored. There are challenges in the existing modes, but that can be fulfilled by tokenization,” Vasudevan said at a fireside chat during Global Fintech Fest (GFF) 2026.
Tokenization is the process of representing an asset’s ownership and transaction records digitally on a blockchain or distributed ledger.
The RBI executive director said that the central bank aims to expand the interface to include more asset classes beyond existing tested instruments. While gold is a possibility, other financial assets such as bank deposits are also under examination.
The RBI has already tested tokenization through its UMI with about 248 certificate-of-deposit transactions worth Rs 17,000 crore processed so far, according to Vasudevan. About two-thirds of these transactions were in the secondary market. He said tokenization can potentially cover the entire lifecycle of an asset from issuance and trading to settlement, interest payments and servicing.
“We hear about real assets being tokenized, artworks being tokenized, fungible tokens, non-fungible tokens, even data being tokenized. But my intention here is to talk about financial asset tokenization. When we are looking at the financial assets, there are many in our ecosystem, we can talk about certificates of deposits, commercial papers, corporate bonds.”
He cited the example of RBI’s existing Card-on-File Tokenization (CoFT) mandate (active since October 2022) where around 118 crore cards have been tokenized, with 5 billion transactions processed since.
However, he warned against overlooking the risks of tokenizing financial assets. According to him, legal uncertainty, data privacy, liquidity, interoperability and the risk of excessive concentration could pose significant challenges as India expands tokenization of financial assets.
Delivering keynote address in another panel, at the same event, Rohit Jain, Deputy Governor, RBI said speed, concentration, and opacity are three concerns in emerging technologies as they become more deeply embedded in finance.
During a fireside chat at the event, NITI Aayog Vice-Chairman Ashok Kumar Lahiri said that India’s next big economic challenge is not growth but manufacturing at scale, and achieving that will require a sharp increase in investment, deeper credit markets and greater integration with global value chains.
Lahiri said that while the recent rise in manufacturing’s share of GDP is encouraging, India needs to build manufacturing capacity on a much larger scale. “We need much more manufacturing with scale. When you look at China, the scale is enormous. We do not have that kind of scale and to acquire that, we need investments.” He also stressed the need for India to plug more deeply into global value chains.
He also said that the Indian economy has been doing reasonably well and will regain its mojo and return to a current account surplus soon.
On foreign investment in India, Lahiri said domestic savings, not foreign savings, must do most of the heavy lifting.
He explained that in the early part of the 19th century, the United States imported capital from Europe, while East Asia consistently ran current account surpluses because it had foreign direct investment and foreign portfolio investment, but most of the investment was financed by domestic savings.
Neelkanth Mishra, chairperson of the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) said the Aadhaar system is handling about 100 million authentications a day and is preparing to scale that capacity to 250-300 million, as its use expands across financial services and other digital platforms. He informed that 600 entities now use Aadhaar to establish identity.
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