Bank Indonesia Is Building Its Own Digital Rupiah. Here's What Proyek Garuda Actually Is, and What It Isn't
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5 min read
On 22 to 23 September 2026, Bank Indonesia held its benchmark rate at 5.75%, the first policy meeting run by Acting Governor Destry Damayanti after her predecessor's surprise resignation. That decision got the headlines. Quietly, in the background, Bank Indonesia has spent nearly four years building something separate: a digital version of the rupiah itself, under a project called Proyek Garuda. It is not a cryptocurrency, it has no launch date for ordinary people, and it does almost nothing yet that affects your money today. Here is what it actually is.
Proyek Garuda is Bank Indonesia's own name for its exploration of a central bank digital currency (CBDC), a digital form of a country's official currency issued directly by its central bank rather than by a commercial bank or a private company. Bank Indonesia launched the project on 30 November 2022 by publishing a white paper called "Proyek Garuda: Navigating the Architecture of Digital Rupiah," which laid out the high-level design and a three-stage roadmap for what it calls Digital Rupiah.
The 2022 white paper split the project into three stages:
| Stage | What it covers |
|---|---|
| Immediate state | Wholesale Digital Rupiah for issuance, redemption and transfer between banks only |
| Intermediate state | Expanding wholesale Digital Rupiah into monetary operations and money market activity |
| End state | Full integration of wholesale Digital Rupiah with a retail version for the general public |
As of this writing, Bank Indonesia has only completed work inside the first stage. It finished a proof of concept for the wholesale cash ledger and published the report "Project Garuda: Wholesale Rupiah Digital Cash Ledger" on 13 December 2024. That means the entire project so far has tested only how Digital Rupiah moves between banks and Bank Indonesia itself. Nothing about the retail stage, the version an ordinary person would actually hold and spend, has moved past the design stage.
Nobody outside the banking system. The version Bank Indonesia has piloted, called W-Rupiah Digital (Wholesale Rupiah Digital), is restricted to commercial banks and clearing institutions that Bank Indonesia designates as eligible participants. Its job is to settle interbank transactions, monetary operations and money market trades directly on Bank Indonesia's own ledger, which the central bank says should make those settlements faster and cheaper than the current system. An ordinary saver or investor cannot open a Digital Rupiah account, because that product does not exist yet.
On 30 October 2025, at the Indonesia Financial & Digital Economy Festival in Jakarta, then-Governor Perry Warjiyo outlined a further step: a plan to tie Digital Rupiah's value to tokenised Indonesian government bonds, known as Surat Berharga Negara (SBN), that Bank Indonesia already holds. The idea is to use SBN as backing collateral so that bond settlement on the exchange becomes faster and more transparent through blockchain-based automation, while Digital Rupiah itself stays a direct claim on the central bank rather than a claim on any private issuer. This is a design detail for the wholesale and intermediate stages, not a new consumer product.
Digital Rupiah is payment and settlement infrastructure, not an asset class. It is designed to have the same value as the rupiah in your bank account, no more and no less, the same way a digital transfer through your existing bank app doesn't gain or lose value compared to physical cash. There is no Digital Rupiah price to track, nothing to stake, and nothing to buy in anticipation of a future rally, because a CBDC's entire design goal is stability, not appreciation. If a project, app or person offers you a way to "invest in" or "buy early" Digital Rupiah ahead of any public launch, that claim does not match anything Bank Indonesia has actually built or announced.
Bank Indonesia has said the pilot phase will continue through 2026, with no public date given yet for when, or whether, the intermediate and end-state retail rollout begins.
If you want to track what Bank Indonesia is doing with monetary policy today, rather than a wholesale settlement pilot still years from touching retail accounts, NetWort's Macro Context page tracks the current BI Rate alongside inflation, the rupiah's exchange rate and Indonesia's bond yields in one place, so you can follow the decisions that are already shaping your money instead of the ones still on the drawing board.