Reuters has reported that India may pass the bill to criminalize crypto, after all, according to a government official who chose to remain anonymous. The bill won’t make just mining and trading illegal but also simply owning cryptocurrencies.
Those who have crypto investments will be offered a period of six months to cash out their gains without having to face any legal repercussions. It is unknown at the moment if those not obliging could face prison.
Even as the details of the bill remain a secret for the moment, it still represents the largest crackdown on crypto for a major economy. China has also banned digital assets in late 2017, but its citizens are still allowed to hold cryptocurrencies legally.
It is expected that the controversial bill will most likely receive support as the party of Prime Minister Narendra Modi holds the majority.
But this is not the first time that Indian officials decided to stay in the way of progress – in early 2019, a government panel published a draft bill that recommended a jail sentence of up to 10 years for any person mining, holding, transferring, or issuing cryptocurrencies. It is now legal to own crypto assets in India.
The Reserve Bank of India banned financial firms from dealing with crypto exchanges back in 2018, but the ban was lifted in early 2020 by the Supreme Court.
Just months later, it was announced that India was working on introducing a crypto-banning law, and despite some hope given by the country’s Finance Minister, Nirmala Sitharaman, it seems that she won’t receive enough support to stop this from happening.