India’s central bank, the RBI, reminded banks yesterday that its own 2018 cryptocurrency guidelines were no longer valid because the Indian Supreme Court had struck it down in 2020.
The RBI had effectively banned Indian banks from processing payments to/from cryptocurrency exchanges in 2018, throwing the country’s crypto ecosystem into suspended animation. After a case that made its way to the Supreme Court, those guidelines were overturned, and the Indian government was told to draft a law regarding crypto. (That bill has been pending in Parliament for months now.)
However as we have discussed on this group, banks have recently been using those very 2018 guidelines to impose a sort of informal ban on Indian rupee deposits into crypto exchanges, even sending notices to customers. The scramble to use alternative payment methods has meant that access to crypto in India remains extremely inefficient.
It’s probably that yesterday’s clarification will put an end to that.
Here is a screenshot of the RBI’s note yesterday (and a link to the note).
