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Contributor #001 @onboard: Our mission is to expand the onchain economy and make is universally accessible 

will share what i think after writing down my thoughts 

cc @rohitmalekar.eth @denverjude @arpitagarwal would love to know your thoughts too

Turning this into a thread as this turned to be a lot more long than I originally  planned.

India will be one of the quickest to go on-chain and tokenise everything (anything related to financial services/government certificates/attested documents to start). Can read more about finternet and how it will play out (have added a link below). SEBI (India's SEC) wants to adopt blockchains to enable same day trade settlements, RBI (India's Central Bank) wants to adopt it for settling G-sec/money market trades (very opaque market prone to abuse & manipulation), programmable CBDCs for subsidies (prone to leakage). On-chain property records, caste certificates, any certificate or document because once on the blockchain they cannot be modified or forged (think Puja Khedkar).

However, where it will fall short is that it will not be built on public blockchains and will be the furthest thing from permissionless. Can look at eRupee (India's CBDC) which is live & operational (and interoperable with UPI (India's payment rails operated by banks) and the National Blockchain Project (government operated blockchain as a service for government-approved use-cases) to understand how it will develop.

The government has very different objectives with adopting blockchain, and we have to keep that in mind, because government will be driving adoption (for the start).

Nintendo + Civ5 type of person.

My interests are fintech, crypto and India.


For them it is about reducing costs, improving accessibility. They understand existing systems can't scale to serve all of India. Another innate benefits of blockchain will bring transparency, help with reducing inefficiencies in the system (corruption & fraud), and combine it with AI it will make the job easy for regulators. For eg. if every loan is tokenised and monitored, the regulators can detect things on their own rather than relying on in-house compliance teams or auditors (a lot of scams could have been prevented if all transactions were part of one ledger that governments can monitor). The necessary corollary of that is that it will probably be bad for individual privacy.

I think there will be some space for public blockchains to interact with government-operated blockchains but it will be limited to NFTs, and other user-controlled assets (like NFTs, credentials etc.) but I am not very optimistic or sure how it will play out on this aspect.

Although, once the government is driving blockchain and wallet adoption, and educating people on cryptography and people are used to using their digital wallets for everything, adoption of public blockchain will come naturally but they would need additional use-cases or something they can't get on government controlled blockchains.

Although, once the government is driving blockchain and wallet adoption, and educating people on cryptography and people are used to using their digital wallets for everything, adoption of public blockchain will come naturally but they would need additional use-cases or something they can't get on government controlled blockchains.

https://www.piie.com/sites/default/files/2024-04/2024-04-19nilekanippt.pdf

https://static.pib.gov.in/WriteReadData/specificdocs/documents/2024/sep/doc202494387501.pdf

Also I will only say that please don't make heroes when there are commercial interests at play a lot of this requires tech to be built for the intermediaries most of which will be outsourced. A lot of this work was anyways happening in government departments and committees. 

You should see which company has been receiving major contracts to build software for regulators (GST/MCA), banks (CBS) etc and if they have done a good job of it. So there is an element of commercial interest which is also influencing the design decisions and lobbying (a lot) that goes on behind the scene.