Mumbai: The Reserve Bank of India is exploring gold as the next asset class for tokenisation, as it looks to expand its Unified Markets Interface beyond financial instruments such as certificates of deposit and commercial paper that have already been tested on the platform.
“There were some discussions yesterday. We were looking at gold tokenisation as one more avatar that is being explored. There are challenges in the existing modes, but that can be fulfilled by tokenisation,” said P. Vasudevan, Executive Director, Reserve Bank of India, at the Global Fintech Fest 2026.
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RBI has already begun experimenting with tokenised financial-market instruments through the Unified Markets Interface, a platform that allows tokenised assets to be settled using wholesale central bank digital currency. The central bank had earlier piloted tokenised certificates of deposit as part of this initiative.
“Unified Markets Interface has been a good launch pad, but we are hopeful to add more asset classes to it, and that will actually make the ecosystem much bigger,” Vasudevan said.
While gold could be the next addition, RBI is also examining how tokenisation could extend across a broader set of financial assets. Vasudevan pointed to deposits, corporate bonds and other instruments, but cautioned that some applications could create new regulatory and systemic risks.
Deposit tokenisation, in particular, requires greater caution. Vasudevan said it “is going to open another financial stability issue,” even as it could potentially address challenges faced by individual institutions.
He also flagged risks around legal certainty, data privacy and consent management, concentration of activity on a few platforms and interoperability.
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“One of the success stories of our payments ecosystem has been interoperability. We don’t want to lose on that,” Vasudevan said.
RBI already has experience with tokenisation at scale through its card-on-file framework. Vasudevan said about 118 crore cards have been tokenised, accounting for around 5 billion transactions.
