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Digital Ruble Goes Nationwide, India's Multi-Rail Push & Streaming Beats Cinema
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Russia's digital ruble hits 87,000 accounts in ten days as India simultaneously launches a blockchain bond pilot and expands Credit Line on UPI — the CBDC adoption race is accelerating. Today's briefing also covers the EU's $100M AI sovereignty bet and a sharp shift in consumer payment patterns away from entertainment venues.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Russia's digital ruble went nationwide, and within ten days it had eighty-seven thousand accounts and more than fifty thousand transactions. That's not a test anymore.
The contrast with Japan is stark. The Bank of Japan has essentially signaled that building a public-facing digital currency is far harder than running a pilot.
India is moving on multiple fronts simultaneously, and the scale of that push is worth pausing on. At Global Fintech Fest twenty twenty-six, the Reserve Bank of India unveiled a blockchain-based securities settlement pilot for corporate bonds.
The consumer spending shift is worth tracking alongside the infrastructure story. Online payments in the US moved from forty-eight percent of transactions in twenty nineteen to fifty-eight percent in twenty twenty-six.
The EU's Scaleup Europe Fund, a five billion euro vehicle backed by the European Commission, Novo Holdings, CriteriaCaixa, and Santander, led a one hundred million dollar Series B into Swedish healthtech firm Tandem Health. Total funding now stands at one hundred and sixty million dollars.
The one or two things worth watching from here. First, Russia's digital ruble transaction volume over the next quarter.
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