According to an anonymous source, billionaire Nandan Nilekani said cryptocurrencies could help Indians.
Nandan Nilekani, co-founder of India’s leading technology company Infosys, urged the government to help MSMEs (small and medium-sized businesses marginalized from financial services across Asia) use bitcoin to access capital.
Nandan Nilekani, a prominent Indian entrepreneur and government adviser, made this statement in favor of cryptocurrency, as the government is known to be planning a ban on personal digital assets.
According to Cointelegraph on the 22nd (local time), Nilekani participated in a clubhouse meeting with angel investor Balaji Srinivasan to discuss the state of cryptocurrency in India, a local economic journal Money Control reported.
Nilecani is a co-founder of Infosys, India’s leading technology company, and the founding architect of the national biometric identification system, Aadhaar. He is the chairman of the Indian Special Committee on Digital Payments Evaluation in India and is also an advisor to several government agencies and the Reserve Bank of India.
At the meeting, Nilecani argued that Indians should be allowed to have cryptocurrencies as an asset class, and that they should be able to freely use cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin (BTC) in Korea. Reportedly, this billionaire businessman notes that cryptocurrency is being used as a store of value, saying, “Think of cryptocurrency as an asset class and allow people some degree of cryptocurrency. Cryptocurrency as a trading medium should be used per day. It won’t work as fast as UPI (American Telecom and Card Brand), which targets 1 billion transactions, but cryptocurrency has tremendous capital power,” summarizing the promising potential of cryptocurrencies.
Nilecani urged regulators in India to need to help India’s small and medium-sized businesses access capital through cryptocurrencies.
He said about stablecoins and digital rupees, “I’m not sure if I will need a personal stablecoin or if a digital rupee will be enough. We know how it will help Indians, MSME is using bitcoin to capitalize on capital,” he said. We need to look at how it can be approached. No matter how advanced the technology is, no one should be left behind.”
Nilecani’s remarks came amid increasing uncertainty and doubts about the legal status of cryptocurrencies in India. Reportedly, anonymous sources representing Indian government officials have been spreading reports of an upcoming cryptocurrency ban since early 2021.
But India’s Finance Minister Nirmala Sitaraman has argued several times that “the ministry has no plans to ban Indians from using bitcoin.”