Mintoak Acquires Digiledge in $3.5 Million Deal

PayPal and HDFC Bank-backed Mintoak has acquired Digiledge for approximately $3.5 million, marking a milestone as the first acquisition in India’s central bank digital currency (CBDC) space.

Mintoak, an Indian e-commerce startup that facilitates merchant payments, has gained Digiledge, which specializes in CBDC and bill payments. This acquisition enables Mintoak’s partner banks—HDFC Bank, Axis Bank, and SBI—to offer payment solutions using the e-rupee, India’s CBDC.

Mintoak CEO Raman Khanduja expressed that the goal is to make it “easier for merchant acquirers to grow and help more small and medium enterprises access digital tools and financial services.”

Related Updates:

• India’s CBDC platform reached 5 million users 20 months after its pilot launch.

The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) initiated its e-rupee pilot in December 2022. Initially restricted to banks, it extended to payment firms in April 2023.

Despite efforts, e-rupee adoption has been slow. By late June 2024, there were only 1 million retail transactions, a milestone achieved after local banks introduced incentives and partially paid salaries with the digital currency.

RBI previously urged banks to elevate daily transactions to 1 million by late 2023 to assess scalability. This initiative has since stalled, raising concerns about the future of the digital currency due to the disparity between incentivized metrics and actual usage.