Asian countries seem to have some very conflicting ideas when it comes to cryptocurrencies. While countries like China have issued outright bans on Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs), others like South Korea are boldly championing innovation in the space – in fact, South Korean has recently invested $100 million into a project that is aimed at developing Seoul as a potential hub for blockchain technology. India, on the other hand, seems to be stuck in the middle – the country which happens to be the second most populous country in the world and the world’s sixth-largest economy is seriously conflicted when it comes to how it plans to regulated crypto.
As both a market and a developer, India is ones of the countries that has always been very proactive when it comes to the integration of technological innovations in its framework. In 2017, for instance, the contribution of information technology to the gross domestic products of the country stood at a whopping 7.7 percent. Naturally, considering the immense potential that blockchain technology and digital currencies have, it would seem that India would move fast to embrace and integrate them so as to grow the technology industry even further. The applications and use cases of the technology are literally limitless.
About the Panel and the Report
In November 2017, the Indian government’s finance ministry set up a panel to discuss the very pressing issue of crypto. Since then there have been a number of occurrences most of which have not been so good to the crypto community. For instance, earlier this year in April, the global cryptocurrency community expressed concern that the country had stifled any type of innovation in the crypto space due to a decision by the Reserve Bank of India that required all other banks to sever their relationships with any crypto-related businesses.
The panel that was created by the government was tasked with drafting regulations for virtual currencies in India and was headed by India’s Economic Affairs Secretary, Subash Chandra Garg. This panel has recently submitted a report to India’s prime minister suggesting a new legal framework for cryptocurrencies. Already, there is a lot of speculation regarding the actual contents of the report since the actual details are yet to be released to the public domain.
However, initial reports suggest that, in addition to the proposed new regulations for the crypto industry in India, the panel has also suggested a “new sovereign backed virtual or cryptocurrency may be proposed considering global circumstances; probably at a later stage.”
This report is of great importance not just in India but for the entire crypto space – the country has proven to have an immense underlying potential to cater to a magnificent crypto marketplace but it there have been concerns that overregulation is messing it all up.
