NPCI Releases Drunix on 17 June 2026 as Open-Source Enterprise Blockchain
The National Payments Corporation of India published Drunix on GitHub on 17 June 2026, making its new enterprise blockchain platform freely available under an open-source licence. NPCI — the organisation that built and operates India's Unified Payments Interface, RuPay card network, FASTag, IMPS, NACH, and Bharat BillPay, among the most consequential pieces of retail payment infrastructure in the world — has now extended its open-source technology contributions beyond payments into distributed ledger infrastructure. Drunix is designed to help companies, financial institutions, and government bodies build and scale tokenisation platforms, digital asset ecosystems, and multi-organisation blockchain networks with the privacy controls, governance standards, and interoperability that enterprise and public infrastructure deployments require.
What Drunix Is: An Enhanced Fork of Hyperledger Fabric
Drunix is built as an enhanced fork of Hyperledger Fabric, the dominant open-source permissioned blockchain platform maintained under the Linux Foundation. Hyperledger Fabric is used globally across supply chain finance, trade documentation, healthcare identity, and government systems — it is the enterprise blockchain substrate that most large-scale, non-cryptocurrency blockchain deployments run on. NPCI's fork preserves Hyperledger Fabric's permissioned architecture — in which network participants are known and verified, access is governed by policy, and transaction data is private to authorised parties — while introducing architectural improvements targeting higher transaction throughput, better scalability at volume, and more efficient operational management.
Technical Improvements and Backward Compatibility
Drunix is designed to improve on standard Hyperledger Fabric in throughput, scalability, and operational efficiency, while maintaining full backward compatibility with existing Hyperledger Fabric deployments. Organisations that have already built production Fabric networks — for trade finance, supply chain traceability, or KYC data sharing — can migrate to or integrate with Drunix without rebuilding existing chaincode, governance configurations, or network topology. The backward compatibility commitment is deliberate: Hyperledger Fabric has significant installed-base adoption in India's banking, logistics, and government sectors, and an incompatible fork would require rebuilding rather than upgrading. NPCI engineered the upgrade path to lower adoption friction for the organisations most likely to benefit.
NPCI's Open-Source Track Record: Falcon Came First
Drunix is NPCI's second major open-source contribution in the blockchain and tokenisation space. The first was Falcon, a production-grade platform focused on blockchain network management and orchestration — the operational layer responsible for deploying, monitoring, and governing running blockchain networks. Drunix addresses a different layer: the blockchain runtime itself, meaning the transaction ordering, execution, and state storage engine that determines how fast and at what scale blockchain operations execute.
Together, Falcon and Drunix provide an NPCI-backed, openly licenced stack covering both operational management and transactional execution for enterprise blockchain deployments. This two-layer open-source contribution follows the Digital Public Infrastructure model that has guided India's technology strategy in payments — build foundational components openly, allow the private sector to compose applications on top, and retain governance and interoperability at the infrastructure level without extracting rent through proprietary licences.
The Tokenisation and Digital Assets Context for India
Drunix arrives at a significant moment for India's digital asset and tokenisation landscape. The Reserve Bank of India's retail and wholesale CBDC pilots have demonstrated demand for programmable digital currency infrastructure. The International Financial Services Centre Authority at GIFT City in Gujarat has issued frameworks for tokenised securities settlement. India's participation in Project Nexus — the Bank for International Settlements' cross-border CBDC corridor linking South and Southeast Asian economies — is advancing. These initiatives require enterprise blockchain infrastructure capable of operating at financial-market throughput with strong privacy guarantees between parties, precisely the class of problem Drunix was built for.
Drunix's compatibility with existing Hyperledger Fabric deployments also means it can integrate with the trade finance, supply chain, and KYC identity networks already running on Fabric across India's banking and enterprise sectors, rather than requiring parallel infrastructure to be built from scratch.
What Drunix Means for Indian Software and Fintech Teams
For Indian software companies, system integrators, and fintech teams, Drunix provides a production-capable, NPCI-backed blockchain runtime that can be deployed on private, hybrid, or regulated cloud infrastructure. Teams building tokenised lending platforms, digital asset custody solutions, supply chain finance networks, or cross-border settlement infrastructure can build on Drunix without acquiring proprietary blockchain software licences from commercial vendors.
The open-source release on GitHub opens a service delivery model for Indian software firms: deploying, customising, and maintaining Drunix-based enterprise blockchain networks for banks, insurers, commodity exchanges, and logistics companies. That capability can be built on a trusted, freely available, NPCI-vetted codebase rather than on proprietary platforms that extract vendor margins at every stack layer. For teams already building on India's Digital Public Infrastructure — integrating with UPI, Account Aggregator, or DigiLocker — Drunix is a natural extension of that infrastructure-first approach into the distributed ledger layer.
The Bottom Line
The National Payments Corporation of India released Drunix on 17 June 2026 as an open-source enterprise blockchain platform built as an enhanced fork of Hyperledger Fabric, published on GitHub. Drunix improves on standard Hyperledger Fabric in transaction throughput, scalability, and operational efficiency while maintaining backward compatibility with existing Fabric deployments. It targets tokenisation platforms, digital asset ecosystems, and multi-organisation networks requiring enterprise-grade privacy, governance, and interoperability. Drunix is NPCI's second open-source blockchain contribution, following Falcon, which addressed blockchain network management and orchestration. Together, Falcon and Drunix provide an openly licenced stack for both transactional execution and operational management of enterprise blockchain infrastructure — extending India's Digital Public Infrastructure philosophy beyond payments into the emerging tokenised asset economy.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is NPCI's Drunix and when was it released?+
Drunix is an open-source, enterprise-grade blockchain platform released by the National Payments Corporation of India on 17 June 2026 and published on GitHub. NPCI — the organisation behind UPI, RuPay, FASTag, IMPS, and NACH — built Drunix as an enhanced fork of Hyperledger Fabric, the dominant open-source permissioned blockchain used in enterprise and government deployments worldwide. Drunix is designed to help organisations build tokenisation platforms, digital asset ecosystems, and multi-organisation blockchain networks at enterprise scale, with improvements in transaction throughput, scalability, and operational efficiency compared to standard Hyperledger Fabric. It is the second open-source blockchain contribution from NPCI, following Falcon, which addressed blockchain network management and orchestration.
How does Drunix compare to standard Hyperledger Fabric?+
Drunix is built as an enhanced fork of Hyperledger Fabric, preserving its permissioned blockchain architecture — known participants, policy-governed access, and private transaction data — while introducing architectural improvements to transaction throughput, scalability, and operational efficiency. These improvements make Drunix better suited to high-volume financial infrastructure use cases such as CBDC settlement, tokenised securities, and trade finance networks that standard Hyperledger Fabric can struggle to serve at scale. Critically, Drunix maintains full backward compatibility with existing Hyperledger Fabric deployments: organisations with production Fabric networks can migrate to or integrate with Drunix without rebuilding their chaincode, governance configurations, or network topology.
What is NPCI's open-source strategy and what did it build before Drunix?+
NPCI's open-source strategy follows the Digital Public Infrastructure model that has guided India's broader technology approach: build foundational infrastructure components openly, allow the private sector to compose applications on top, and retain governance and interoperability at the base layer without proprietary lock-in. Before Drunix, NPCI released Falcon — a production-grade platform for blockchain network management and orchestration, covering the operational layer for deploying and governing running blockchain networks. Drunix addresses the runtime layer: the transaction processing engine beneath the operational management layer. Together, Falcon and Drunix provide an NPCI-backed open-source stack covering both the execution and management dimensions of enterprise blockchain deployment.
What use cases can Indian companies and software teams build on Drunix?+
Indian software teams and fintech companies can use Drunix to build tokenised financial products, digital asset custody and transfer platforms, supply chain finance networks, trade documentation systems, KYC and identity sharing infrastructure, and cross-border payment settlement systems. The platform's compatibility with existing Hyperledger Fabric networks means it can extend or integrate with the trade finance and supply chain blockchain networks already operating in India's banking and logistics sectors. For RBI CBDC pilots and GIFT City tokenised securities frameworks — both of which require enterprise blockchain infrastructure at financial-market throughput — Drunix provides an NPCI-vetted, openly licenced runtime alternative to proprietary enterprise blockchain platforms, eliminating vendor licence costs and enabling self-hosted deployment within regulated infrastructure.
Written by
TechPillow Team
Sharing insights on technology, product development, and the Indian tech ecosystem.