India’s government will introduce a bill to ban private cryptocurrencies and create a framework for a central bank-backed digital money, parliament said in a shock announcement late Tuesday. It is the latest such move by a major emerging economy after China declared all cryptocurrency transactions illegal in September. India’s cryptocurrency market has boomed since the country’s Supreme Court overturned a previous ban in April last year, growing more than 600 percent over the past year according to research by Chainalysis. Between 15 and 100 million people in Asia’s third-largest economy are estimated to own cryptocurrencies, with total holdings in the billions of dollars. The market price of Bitcoin appeared unaffected and was up 2.0 percent in Tuesday’s trade.

Source: The Guardian November 23, 2021 15:46 UTC