Crypto-assets: To ban or not to ban?

Financial regulation is about striking the right balance between enabling innovation and ensuring customer protection

Cryptocurrencies, or more correctly crypto-assets, may be a nightmare for regulatory policy but they are a columnist’s delight! The number of op-ed words on this topic, just in the recent weeks, may now equal the purported number of Indian investors in these assets. However, the topic is important and multi-dimensional enough to justify one more column.

Crypto-assets in taxonomic rank are more like a genus and not a species. Put simply this is not a homogeneous group — and the characteristics and utility of one token, say Bitcoin, may be very different from another, say XRP. This divergence in qualities lends