Despite the government’s plan to bak all cryptocurrencies in India, one of the top technocrats and Aadhaar architect Nandan Nilekani says that people should be allowed to engage with them. 

Earlier, Nilekani supported startups such as Tracxn, ShopX, RailYatri, Power2SME, and many more. Along with Sanjeev Agarwal (Helion venture co-founder), he also set-up a venture capital fund known as Fundamentum in 2017. He said that cryptocurrencies should be treated as an asset class and people should be allowed to have a part of it. 

His comment came amid the government plan to ban cryptos. The government will soon introduce the Cryptocurrency and Regulation of Official Digital Currency Bill, 2021, which will ban all private cryptocurrencies and concerns over their use. 

Nandan said that we should think of crypto as an asset class and allow people to have some. Crypto will not work as fast as UPI, which is targeting a billion transactions a day. However, crypto has huge capital. 

The crypto startups, who have been looking at an exposed future of India have already welcomed such comments from Nandan. They feel that crypto has a very strong impact and the global government has already started to accept it as their currency. 

Nandan further added that although Indian regulators are considering a Central Bank Digital Currency, he is not sure if we need a private coin or if a digital rupee will be good enough. He added that India needs to look at how it will help Indians, how MSMEs can access the capital using bitcoin.