The Habit Of Exchanging Money Will Soon Become Extinct, Soon Bank Indonesia Will Introduce Digital Rupiah

JAKARTA – The Eid al-Fitr momentum is often marked by the tradition of exchanging new money to be distributed to relatives. This habit occurs every year so that Bank Indonesia (BI) provides special facilities in the form of money exchange services at several strategic points that can be reached by the public.

VOI noted that BI has even provided IDR 195 trillion of new money to be distributed throughout Indonesia. But do you know readers, currently the central bank has prepared a plan to distribute rupiah currency in digital form.

Quoting BI's official website, it is stated that digital rupiah is rupiah currency that has a digital format and can be used like physical money (paper and metal money), electronic money (chip and server based), and money in payment instruments using cards/APMK (cards debit and credit) that we use today.

The digital rupiah itself is only issued by Bank Indonesia as the central bank of the Republic of Indonesia. Digital rupiah is also not included in crypto assets or stableco.

"The initial step in developing digital rupiah, BI through the Garuda Project, is to issue a White Paper as a communication to the public regarding development plans. In addition, the White Paper aims to obtain input from various related parties.

After the issuance of the White Paper, BI will undertake a series of iterative and gradual developments starting with gathering public views on the digital rupiah design starting with public consultation (consultative papers and focus group discussions), technology experiments (proof of concept, prototyping, and piloting/sandboxing), and ending with a review of the policy stance.

This iterative series aims to open up a broad space of flexibility for stakeholders and the industry to prepare themselves and carry out trials together before the digital rupiah is implemented.

Digital rupiah will be issued in two types, namely wholesale digital rupiah (w-digital rupiah) with limited access coverage and only distributed for settlement of wholesale transactions such as monetary operations, foreign exchange market transactions, and money market transactions.

Then the second is retail digital rupiah (r-digital rupiah) with access coverage that is open to the public and distributed for various retail transactions both in the form of payment transactions and transfers, by personal/individuals and businesses (merchants and corporations).

Although the process of issuing digital rupiah still has a long way to go. However, digital rupiah is a necessity. Apart from being a fast, easy, cheap, safe and reliable currency in the digital ecosystem in the future, digital rupiah is also a solution that ensures that the rupiah remains the only legal currency in the Republic of Indonesia. So, it's not impossible that the tradition of exchanging new money during Eid will become extinct in the future.