Vajra: The Indian Payments Platform Built On Blockchain Is Live

In times when the Indian government is very uncertain about the use of cryptocurrency, we can see that the National Corporation of India (NPCI) officially announced its permissioned blockchain-based platform named Vajra which is designed to make the payment process easier, faster and more transparent.

After a lot of research, we can see that the NPCI has developed a distributed ledger technology mechanism which will provide a highly secure, tamper-proof database for different payment procedures. As the blockchain news show, we can also see that the NPCI is an umbrella organization for retail payments and settlement systems in the country. It is also an initiative of the Reserve Bank of India and the Indian Banks’ Association under the provisions of the Payment and Settlement Systems Act 2007 – which aimed at creating a robust payments infrastructure in the country.

The NPCI now aims at becoming “the best payment network globally” and Vajra is a proof of those plans. Right now, 56 banks are shareholders of the NPCI which is supported by 10 banks: State Bank of India, Punjab National Bank, HSBC,Citibank, Canara Bank, Bank of India, Bank of Baroda, Union Bank of India, , ICICI Bank and HDFC Bank.

The Vajra platform is designed to be blockchain-based where only a registered party under the network administrator can be part of the blockchain network. As such, Vajra’s architecture will introduce three main types of nodes, including:

• a Clearing House node: Designed to process admin rights for the platform and maintained by NPCI. This node will provide a root-authority-signed TLS certificate from the network’s permissions service to all Participant nodes.
• a Notary node: Reserved for validating a transaction only if the Aadhar biometric is used for authentication and receiving transaction only from the Clearing House node.
• a Participant node: Represented by the banks, a group of nodes which can post, receive and view transactions.

In a nutshell, the main benefits of Vajra are tied to ensuring zero or minimal processing times for reconciliation and faster dispute resolution when implementing cryptography – all in order to increase the security of payment transactions.

In times when manually processing payments bears a considerable risk of error and takes long time to be processed, the Vajra platform offers transparency, time sensitivity, fast processing, data security and a strong dispute mechanism.