Nandan Nilekani said he supports regulating crypto-currencies as financial assets. During a conversation on the Clubhouse app on Monday evening, the non-executive chairman of Infosys and the chief architect of the Aadhaar program suggested that the government's proposed digital currency can sit on a parallel rail on the Unified Payments Interface (UPI). "We should think of crypto as an asset class and allow people to have some crypto. Crypto as a transaction medium will not work as fast as UPI, which is targeting a billion transactions a day. But crypto has enormous capital," Nilekani said. MediaNama attended the Clubhouse call, which was not public. "There is no question that Indians have already started using the underlying technology of Bitcoin, which is blockchain...I do not think we can offer crypto-currencies as a transaction medium, it won't compare in performance with UPI for many years...As Indians become more comfortable with cryptos as an asset class, we will make the steps to allow people have some holdings in cryptos as long as they declare them. This will have to be done in a very structured manner, the debate will happen."—Nandan Nilekani He said that while the government and regulators were looking at developing a Central Bank Digital Currency or CBDC in the next two-three years years, a private stablecoin would not be required since a Digital Rupee would be enough. "If MSMEs need capital and if we can say that the capital in the crypto-world, which is $0.5 to $1 trillion, if that…
