BENGALURU (Reuters) – India’s Group of 20 (G20) president’s push to regulate cryptocurrencies won support from the International Monetary Fund and the United States on Saturday as the bloc’s finance chiefs wrap up two days of talks.
India has said it wants a collective global effort to tackle issues related to cryptocurrencies like bitcoin, and the finance ministry said it held a workshop for G20 member states to discuss how to develop a common framework.
Speaking to Reuters on the sidelines of the G20 meeting in Bengaluru, US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said it was “critical” to create a strong regulatory framework, but added that the United States had not proposed any outright bans.
“We have not proposed a total ban on crypto-activity, but it is very important to create a strong regulatory framework,” Yellen said. “We work with other governments.”
Earlier, IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva told reporters after co-chairing a meeting with Indian Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman that banning crypto should be an option.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government has been discussing drafting a law to regulate or even ban cryptocurrencies for several years, but has not made a final decision. The Reserve Bank of India has said that cryptocurrencies should be banned as they are similar to Ponzi schemes.
On Thursday, the IMF laid out a nine-point action plan for how countries should deal with crypto-assets, with point number one asking not to grant cryptocurrencies legal tender status.
Such efforts have become a priority for authorities, the fund said, following the collapse of a number of crypto exchanges and assets over the past couple of years, adding that doing nothing now is “unacceptable.”
(Reporting by Aftab Ahmed, Sarita Chaganti Singh, Shivangi Acharya and Dave Loder; Writing by Miral Fahmi; Editing by Krishna N. Das)
