The CEO of India’s leading cryptocurrency exchange WazirX, Nischal Shetty, is pushing against a call for Bitcoin to be regulated and treated like a corporate stock. Meanwhile on Monday, the founder of BEGIN India think tank, Deepak Kapoor, suggested that Bitcoin be regulated and traded like any corporate stock.
“Bitcoin should be traded like a stock. That is the only legal status that it can get, and it should get this status.”
Speaking to BusinessWorld on Monday, Kapoor added that it will be mistake to legalize Bitcoin as a currency, stressing that it will put the entire Indian economy at risk. WazirX CEO, however, disagreed with this view, saying Bitcoin does not belong in the same class as corporate stocks. According to CoinDesk, the CEO said,
“Bitcoin is not a slice of a company that you can buy or invest in. Rather, it is seen as an asset, like gold for example. Hence, it can’t be seen as a stock.”
India has become a growing industry for Bitcoin after a long period of resistance by authorities. Thanks to the Indian Supreme Court, the decision to ban cryptocurrencies was recently reversed. According to Kapoor, if the cryptocurrency industry in India must continue to exist then the issue of crypto-facilitated crimes must also be addressed.
He suggests that a thorough study of the industry should be carried out to understand how it functions in order to enable proper regulation to curb cryptocurrency-related crimes.
India, with its large population, is a big market for the crypto and blockchain industry. With the support of big names such as Binance, Coinbase and Tim Draper, the industry has the capacity to expand. Earlier this year, shortly after launching, peer-to-peer BTC trading platform Paxful became the top P2P marketplace for BTC trading in the country. India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi also recently advocated support for blockchain technology, calling it an “opportunity in frontier technology”.
If India continues to advance friendly policies, it could play a major role in the global growth of the entire cryptocurrency industry. The peer-to-peer trading market in the country recently tripled in spite of regulatory uncertainty. This means a favorable regulatory framework can help boost the industry significantly and make India one of the key crypto hubs in the world.
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