Indian Draft Strategy Pushes For State-Owned Crypto

It’s been a week since the Reserve Bank of India confirmed that cryptocurrencies are technically legal, though regulated companies are still banned from using it. However, it seems that new information has come to light: A draft national strategy is pushing to create a digital rupee to hop on the crypto train.

10% Of Global GDP Predicted TO Be Based On DLT

As reports are saying about the matter, the National Institute for Smart Governance, or NISG, has recently submitted a new draft strategy. This draft strategy concerns blockchain technology and will have comments open for stakeholders to take part in. With this, it’s planned to help define India’s crypto and distributed ledger ecosystem to try and determine the best possible solution for it.

As the paper states, blockchain technology was a subject of significant priority within the World Economic Forum that happened at Davos. Through a survey conducted, it was determined that a total of 10% of the world’s GDP could be stored by way of Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) by the year 2027.

India Envisioned Frontrunner

With this draft strategy, it’s envisioned that India takes the lead, heading the global innovation, commercialization, adoption, and education of crypto and blockchain technologies. This would count for both the private and public sectors and is envisioned to happen as early as 2025.

The document further recommends that the country’s government itself start the development of its own Central Bank Digital Currency, or CBDC. This currency is supposed to be developed by way of collaboration between the RBI and India’s government.

This marks yet another country heavily considering taking part in the crypto arms race happening between countries as of late. Of all the countries involved, China is leading by a substantial margin, although Europe is playing catch-up, and playing it will. Of the world’s superpowers, only the US is lagging behind as it is. The reason is that their regulating bodies are still debating over what crypto can and can’t be while cracking down on private entities, rather than discussing how to use it themselves.

Functions Over Tools

The draft takes an exciting route, emphasizing that the laws and regulations should be based on the functions that a blockchain can or can’t perform, rather than base it on the technology itself. A smart move, considering how broad-based blockchain technology is becoming

It seems that India is wanting to push this further, planning to offer its Permissioned Blockchain network up and selling “Trust as a service” to a wide array of dApps.