Indian Government Launching Crypto Awareness Campaign – Regulation Bitcoin News

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The gov­ern­ment of India is launch­ing a cryp­to aware­ness cam­paign that will edu­cate investors about the legal­i­ty of cryp­tocur­ren­cies in the coun­try while high­light­ing the risks of invest­ing in cryp­to assets.

Indian Government’s Cryptocurrency Awareness Campaign

The Indi­an gov­ern­ment is report­ed­ly launch­ing a first-of-its-kind cryp­to aware­ness cam­paign. It will be con­duct­ed by the Investor Pro­tec­tion and Edu­ca­tion Fund Author­i­ty, a gov­ern­ment body con­trolled by the Min­istry of Cor­po­rate Affairs.

A gov­ern­ment offi­cial was quot­ed by ET as saying:

The cam­paign will high­light that cryp­tocur­ren­cies are not legal in India and there are also deep risks involved in such assets. Any invest­ment where the peo­ple are being promised lucra­tive and assured returns, there is an ele­ment of high risk.

The gov­ern­ment of India has been work­ing on a cryp­to pol­i­cy since 2019 but noth­ing has been final­ized. Indi­an Finance Min­is­ter Nir­mala Sithara­man said the gov­ern­ment plans to dis­cuss cryp­to reg­u­la­tions with the G20 members.

The Indi­an cen­tral bank, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), has long rec­om­mend­ed a com­plete ban on all cryp­tocur­ren­cies like bit­coin and ether, warn­ing of their poten­tial to desta­bi­lize the country’s mon­e­tary and fis­cal sta­bil­i­ty. RBI Gov­er­nor Shak­tikan­ta Das recent­ly said the next finan­cial cri­sis will come from cryp­tocur­ren­cies if they are not pro­hib­it­ed. How­ev­er, Sithara­man said both ban­ning and reg­u­lat­ing require inter­na­tion­al col­lab­o­ra­tion to be effective.

Rajagopal Menon, vice pres­i­dent at Indi­an cryp­to exchange Wazirx, told The Hindu:

Cryp­tocur­ren­cy invest­ing can be a com­plex and risky endeav­or as the cat­e­go­ry is extreme­ly volatile and works round the clock. It is impor­tant for poten­tial investors to thor­ough­ly edu­cate them­selves before mak­ing any decision.

How­ev­er, some are con­cerned that the Indi­an government’s cryp­to cam­paign may paint cryp­tocur­ren­cies in poor light, giv­en that the Investor Pro­tec­tion and Edu­ca­tion Fund Author­i­ty has con­duct­ed aware­ness cam­paigns on Ponzi schemes, chit funds, and dubi­ous crowd­fund­ing projects.

Vip­ul Khar­ban­da, a non-res­i­dent fel­low at the Cen­tre for Inter­net and Soci­ety (CIS), was quot­ed as saying:

If the gov­ern­ment takes a heavy-hand­ed approach and starts say­ing things like vir­tu­al cur­ren­cy is not legal in India, that will not be entire­ly true. Peo­ple may pre­sume incor­rect­ly that it is illegal.

Both the Indi­an gov­ern­ment and the cen­tral bank have said that cryp­tocur­ren­cy is not ille­gal in India.

Despite hav­ing no reg­u­la­to­ry frame­work for cryp­tocur­ren­cy, the Indi­an gov­ern­ment is tax­ing cryp­to income at 30% and has imposed a 1% tax deduct­ed at source (TDS) on cryp­to transactions.

Do you think the Indi­an government’s cryp­to aware­ness cam­paign will help or hurt the cryp­to indus­try? Let us know in the com­ments sec­tion below.

Kevin Helms 

A stu­dent of Aus­tri­an Eco­nom­ics, Kevin found Bit­coin in 2011 and has been an evan­ge­list ever since. His inter­ests lie in Bit­coin secu­ri­ty, open-source sys­tems, net­work effects and the inter­sec­tion between eco­nom­ics and cryptography.




Image Cred­its: Shut­ter­stock, Pix­abay, Wiki Commons

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