The Government will introduce the much-awaited ‘The Cryptocurrency and Regulation of Official Digital Currency Bill 2021’ in Parliament during the ongoing Winter Session. The Bill may be introduced in the coming days.
It is not on the revised ‘List of Business’ of the Lok Sabha for November 30, 2021. Meanwhile, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman today (November 30) said in Rajya Sabha that a new crypto bill will be introduced in the House after approval from the Cabinet.
The Crypto industry is awaiting a positive regulation that may permit investing and trading in crypto with certain restrictions. The buzz around the Crypto Bill till now has been both positive and negative.
The Crypto Bill is one of the many items on the list of bills to be introduced in Parliament during the Winter Session. Last week, confusion and panic gripped the crypto market in India as the wordings of the description of cryptocurrency bill on the list was the same as last year. It repeated the Govt’s intention to ban private cryptocurrencies.
However, opinions are divided till now as to what the government means by using the term private cryptocurrency. For full clarity, we will have to wait till Cryptocurrency Bill 2021 comes into the public domain.
According to Edul Patel, CEO and Co-founder of crypto investment platform Mudrex, currently, there are more than 11,000 cryptocurrencies that are traded across exchanges. There is a lack of clarity in terms of what the government means by private cryptocurrencies.
Cryptocurrencies like bitcoin, Ether and other cryptos are available across centralised and decentralised exchanges. However, all of these cryptos are created by developers or companies, and not by governments.
“The term private cryptocurrencies is interesting because there was news about governments coming up with their own cryptocurrency. These cryptocurrencies are known as CBDCs or Central Bank Digital Currencies.
There could be a possibility that these CBDCs are public cryptocurrencies and all others be classified under private cryptocurrencies. However, it will be interesting to see what comes under the ambit of private cryptocurrencies,” Patel told FE Online.
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