India’s central bank is tightening its caution on cryptocurrencies and stablecoins, even as global adoption accelerates at a pace that is forcing monetary authorities worldwide to confront a fast-changing digital finance landscape.

Reserve Bank of India Governor Sanjay Malhotra said on Thursday that the institution remains firmly wary of private digital tokens and will continue taking a conservative stance.

“Stablecoins, cryptos, they have a huge risk, and so we are adopting a very cautious approach towards it,” Malhotra said during a memorial lecture at the Delhi School of Economics.

His comments reinforced the RBI’s long-standing opposition to private digital currencies, even as India’s digital payments infrastructure continues to expand rapidly.

Malhotra contrasted the RBI’s skepticism toward crypto with its enthusiastic support for innovations such as the Unified Payments Interface and digital lending.

“But at the same time, when it comes to digital innovations like UPI or digital lending, our stance has been very accommodative and very enabling,” he said.

UPI now powers billions of transactions every month and has become a showcase of India’s digital modernization.

The backdrop to Malhotra’s remarks is a global surge in stablecoin adoption — particularly tokens backed by the U.S. dollar. According to CoinGecko, dollar-pegged stablecoins have amassed a market capitalization above $300 billion, and the broader crypto ecosystem has climbed past $4 trillion. Their expanding footprint has caught the attention of policymakers, including India’s Chief Economic Adviser V. Anantha Nageswaran, who said last month that rising stablecoin popularity will become “an important phenomenon” next year and could complicate monetary policy implementation worldwide.

Despite that momentum, many central banks, including the RBI, remain reluctant to embrace stablecoins. Regulators argue that these tokens, even when fully backed by reserves, can create risks for financial stability, capital flow management, and consumer protection. Supervisors in several jurisdictions have raised concerns about the potential for sudden redemptions, the concentration of stablecoin issuers, and the possibility that large private tokens could undermine national currencies, especially in emerging markets.

Those concerns feed directly into India’s RBI’s push for its own central bank digital currency. At an IMF–World Bank event last month, Malhotra said the RBI intends to promote the digital rupee over any private digital asset, positioning the CBDC as a safer alternative that preserves monetary sovereignty.

Still, the ultimate question of whether crypto should be regulated remains with the government. “The government has to take a final view. There is a working group that was set up earlier, and they will take a final call as to how, if at all, crypto is to be handled in our country,” Malhotra said in response to a question.

So far, New Delhi is leaning away from comprehensive legislation. Reuters reported in September that India prefers partial oversight rather than full regulation, wary that legitimizing crypto could expose the financial system to destabilizing flows. International exchanges are allowed to operate in India if they register locally with an agency responsible for anti-money-laundering checks, but heavy taxes on crypto gains have drained trading volumes and pushed many users offshore.

Even with those restrictions, the RBI has maintained a steady drumbeat of public caution, which has contributed to a near-freeze in interaction between the traditional banking system and crypto platforms. Lenders have avoided providing services to exchanges, limiting the ability of users to move money in and out of digital assets.

Malhotra’s latest remarks suggest that despite the booming global stablecoin market and growing pressure on policymakers to adapt, India will continue charting its own conservative path. The RBI is embracing digital innovation where it sees clear public benefit, but drawing a hard line against private tokens it believes could introduce more risk than reward.

IBM and Cisco Systems have unveiled an ambitious plan to link quantum computers over long distances, setting a goal of demonstrating the concept by the end of 2030.

Both companies say the effort could eventually lay the foundation for a quantum internet, although much of the required technology still has to be invented and will depend on deep collaboration with universities and U.S. federal laboratories.

The companies disclosed the plan on Thursday, framing it as the start of a long technical journey rather than an imminent commercial rollout. Executives stressed that the networks of the future will require entirely new hardware, new scientific breakthroughs, and a unified approach to system design.

Quantum computers have long been viewed as machines capable of tackling problems in physics, chemistry, and computer security that are far beyond the reach of today’s classical supercomputers. They operate using qubits—quantum bits—that can exist in multiple states at once. Yet the same properties that make them remarkable also make them fragile, error-prone, and extremely difficult to scale. IBM is one of the companies leading the race to build a functional, reliable system and has said it aims to have an operational quantum machine by 2029.

Cisco, for its part, has been exploring the networking side of the challenge. Earlier this year, the company opened a dedicated lab to study how quantum systems could be connected—a step that aligns with its long history as a backbone provider for the classical internet.

A major hurdle sits at the very heart of the effort. Quantum computers such as IBM’s operate inside massive cryogenic tanks cold enough that atomic motion nearly stops. This environment allows qubits to function but also traps them in place. To transmit information externally, IBM must convert these stationary qubits into what Jay Gambetta, director of IBM Research and an IBM fellow, described to Reuters as “flying” qubits—microwave-based quantum signals capable of leaving the cryogenic system.

But even these microwave qubits are only the first step. To travel over long distances between Cisco’s fiber-optic switches, the microwave signals must be transformed into optical signals. The component responsible for this conversion—a microwave-optical transducer—does not yet exist at the required level of efficiency or stability. IBM and Cisco plan to work with organizations such as the Superconducting Quantum Materials and Systems Center, led by the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory near Chicago, to develop it.

Cisco and IBM also intend to publish open-source software that integrates all components of the emerging system. This is meant to help researchers and partners experiment, test interoperability, and avoid fragmentation as the technology advances.

Vijoy Pandey, senior vice president of Cisco’s Outshift innovation incubator, said the joint approach is essential.

“We are looking at this end-to-end as a system … rather than two discrete road maps,” he noted. “We are solving it jointly, which has a much better chance of this thing going in the same direction.”

The effort, if successful, could mark the earliest stage of a quantum internet, a network that—unlike today’s classical internet—could rely on quantum mechanics to transmit information with new levels of security and computational power. But the companies acknowledge that the vision is still years away, with fundamental scientific obstacles yet to be overcome.

IBM, Cisco, Google’s quantum division, academic labs, and government-funded research centers are all pushing different pieces of the puzzle forward. The joint IBM–Cisco initiative adds a major industry-scale attempt to tackle the networking challenge, one of the least-developed but most essential elements of a future quantum ecosystem.