Crypto Bill to be tabled in Indian Parliament for approval, seeks to ban crypto
After a lot of dilly-dallying and confusion, it has finally become clear that the crypto bill will be tabled in the Indian Parliament for approval in the coming Winter session which is scheduled to begin within the next few days.
There has been a lot of expectations around the Bill and what it contains as details continue to remain sketchy. The authorities and the regulators have not been very sure of how to deal with cryptos over the last couple of years with multiple bans being imposed only to be revoked by the regulators themselves or by the courts. This has led to a lot of confusion for the crypto industry in India and hence the development has been pretty stunted despite the presence of some strong projects like Polygon within India. The blockchain industry has pretty much flowered but the crypto tokens have been pretty muted as the regulators have not been taking a very lenient view of the same.
Even now, the new Bill that is going to be introduced for passage says that it is to create a framework for the creation of a digital currency that would be issued by the Reserve Bank. It also says that the Bill would be looking to ban all private cryptocurrencies in India with certain exceptions that will be made for the sake of the promotion of technology. By the looks of it, this appears to be a move to ban bitcoin while allowing some other crypto and blockchain products to survive to ensure that the country is not left behind from the rest of the world economy. This seems to be a very tough balancing act that is sought to be played by the government and it remains to be seen how they are going to be managed.
What would be interesting to see is how the regulators plan to classify what are those cryptos that help with technology development and what are those that don’t. It can be said with strong conviction that there is going to be a lot of criticism whichever direction this law takes but if the Bill indeed gets passed and private cryptos like Bitcoin and Ethereum get banned, it is going to be a very big blow for the crypto industry.
