In G20 Presidency, Crypto Regulation Is A ‘Working Priority’, Says Nirmala Sitharaman

Framing crypto assets would be one of eight priorities that are still in the works for the nation’s year-long G20 Presidency, which commences next month, Union Minister of Finance Nirmala Sitharaman said on November 1, 2022. She was addressing the Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations (ICRIER).

She was making the keynote talk at an annual event organised by ICRIER on the approaching G20 Conference. She said, it (crypto) would be one of the un-finalised “priorities”.

“No one single country can succeed in individually, being in a silo, trying to regulate the crypto assets,” Sitharaman says.

“I know work has been done by FSB, OECD, IMF, and also the Bank of International Settlements (BIS). So we will have to bring all of them together and then put it on the table for the members to have a meaningful conversation on it,” she says.

Chief Economic Advisor to the government, V. Anantha Nageswaran, said at the event that identifying “consensus-based solutions for accelerating the scale and scope of the response of the global community to many transboundary challenges, such as regulation of virtual assets,” would be the third objective of India’s G20 Presidency.

Earlier, on October 10, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) responded to a G20 request to develop a framework by presenting the Crypto-Asset Reporting Framework (CARF). The framework is meant for the automatic exchange of information on crypto assets between countries.

A day later, on October 11, the Financial Stability Board (FSB), which is supported by the G20, released its proposed framework for international regulation of activities connected to crypto assets, a first for the global community.

Then, on October 13, Sitharaman was reported to have met Mathias Cormann, Secretary-General, OECD, on the sidelines of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) – World Bank annual meeting. The meeting was seen as a step in the right direction, in terms of crypto regulation.