Finance Minister of India, Nirmala Sitharaman, pointed out that framing regulations around crypto assets should be an international priority. India will host the annual G-20 summit next year and therefore help shape the agenda. She also called out that in next month’s summit, among others the one big un-finalized “priorities” would be crypto regulation.

She also expressed her concerns over the fraudulent activities relating to the misuse of cryptos such as terror financing and money laundering, and said, “I think the biggest risk for all countries across the board is money laundering aspect and also on the aspect of currency being used for financing terror.”

She further discussed her unease over the related risk of cryptocurrencies and unhosted wallets. While addressing her keynote talk at the ICRIER’s annual event at the next G-20 Conference, she opined, “No one single country can succeed individually, being in a silo, trying to regulate the crypto assets.” 

Sitharaman said, “I know work has been done by FSB, OECD, IMF, and also the Bank of International Settlements (BIS). So we will have to bring all of them together and then put it on the table for the members to have a meaningful conversation on it.”

India’s Finance Minister also informed that India is yet to set crypto-specific legislation as “we need to have all the members of the G-20 first of all to come on board to see how best it can be done.”

India’s chief economic adviser, V. Anantha Nageswaran, backend Sitharaman’s stance in the same conference by saying that by recognizing “consensus-based solutions for accelerating the scale and scope of the response of the global community to many transboundary challenges such as regulation of virtual assets” would be the third priority of India’s G-20 Presidency.

On Oct 10, in a response to the G-20 request to develop a framework, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) presented the Crypto-Asset Reporting Framework (CARF). The framework aimed to exchange information relating to crypto assets between countries.

The next day, on Oct 11, for international crypto asset regulation activities, the Financial Stability Board (FSB), supported by the G20, released its first proposed framework for the global community.

Only after two days, on October 13, the Finance Minister met Secretary-General, OECD, Mathias Cormann, to discuss the matters around the International Monetary Fund (IMF) – World Bank annual meeting. In terms of crypto regulation, the meeting was seen as a step in the right direction.

Sitharam made her stance clear by calling crypto an asset and by not considering them as currency, this is in the hands of the country’s central bank, the Reserve Bank of India to decide.

She further acknowledged that crypto as an asset is “in the national interest because you don’t know what the trail leads you to. Is it drug funding? Is it terror funding? Or is it just gaming the system and so on?”