The Supreme Court of India has wrapped up the first three days in a hearing on a landmark case brought against the country’s central bank against its ban on banks’ dealings with cryptocurrency-related businesses.
From Jan. 14 through 16, proceedings were focused on arguments presented by Ashim Sood, the legal counsel for the the Internet & Mobile Association of India (IAMAI).
IAMAI is a not-for-profit industry body whose mandate is to appeal to governments on behalf of internet industry consumers, shareholders and investors. Members include Yahoo! India, Apple, eBay, Unocoin and Etsy.
On the heels of both public and industry-led petitions, the IAMAI is levelling a case against RBI’s controversial imposition of a blanket ban on banks’ dealings with crypto businesses back in April 2018, which came into effect in July of that year.
The ban has taken a heavy toll on the local industry, leading major crypto exchanges such as WazirX to overhaul their business models so as to avoid in-house crypto-fiat conversion; other platforms, like Coindelta, have been forced to terminate their services altogether.
This article draws on the extensive live reporting of Indian crypto regulatory news and analysis platform Crypto Kanoon (CK) via Twitter and private correspondence with CK founders Kashif Raza and Muhammad Danish. Embedded quotations are drawn from CK’s live summary of the court proceedings, and may therefore not be verbatim.
Jan. 14
Sood’s preliminary presentation detailed the effects of RBI’s ban thus far and gave a brief overview on the nature of cryptocurrencies, as well as outlining the potential for distributed ledger technology to enhance data integrity and throughput and efficiency in financial services.
Already in this first presentation, Sood argued that cryptocurrencies should not be classified as currencies, as they can oscillate between serving as a commodity or store of value and as a medium of exchange.
On the last day of the hearing, Sood and the Judge would revisit this point, the latter proposing that in its function as a medium of exchange, cryptocurrency falls under the central bank’s regulatory purview, and, moreover, that it has no utility as a commodity. To this Sood responded that no individual is obliged to pay in cryptocurrency (as legal tender). He used the analogy of a casino to illustrate his point:
“Some people would find value in it and some people would exchange it. It is a technology which should be given a free play. Casino chips are useful to the people who are inside the casino […] When I come out of [a] casino, its use ceases to exist but then some people may exchange it and it holds a value for the interested people. So likewise there is no obligation to use VCs [virtual currencies] as medium of exchange.”
Jan. 15
The second day of the hearing kicked off with Sood’s take of the global context and the judgement of other governments, in which he emphasized that the majority do not recognize cryptocurrency as a form of legal tender.
He then addressed two milestones in the history of cryptocurrency legislation in India: a draft bill that could lead to a blanket prohibition on cryptocurrency use per se, recommended to the Indian government in July 2019, and the RBI banking ban circular from April 2018, which forms the heart of the IAMAI representation.
Tackling the circular, Sood argued that RBI has overstepped its bounds as a regulator, straying into areas that should strictly fall under the regulatory purview of the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI).
The central bank’s focus on concerns regarding volatility and investment risks are, he argued, the remit of SEBI, not the central bank.
The central bank has no power to regulate how a commodity is traded, he said, and its reference to consumer interest — mirroring similar statements by SEBI — is “arbitrary.”
Sood further argued that it is incumbent upon the government and regulators to gather and conduct their own material to analyze in order to support and justify action & intervention. This, he claimed, RBI failed to do before deciding to take action:
“Opinion cannot be formed on imaginary grounds. There must be active application of mind.”
At several points in the hearing, Sood went on to cite evidence that ostensibly points to the fact that SEBI, RBI and the government have relied on third-party analyses of the sector, rather than their own studies.
Referencing conflicting statements from the RBI on the interaction between cryptocurrency use and payments systems, Sood noted that there have been no findings that indicate that payments systems are adversely impacted by the use of cryptocurrencies. RBI has, moreover, contended that it cannot regulate the cryptocurrency sector as it is…
Read More: Three Days of Hearings Before India’s Supreme Court on Crypto Ban