Don't panic!!! India may not be banning most cryptos

So there's been a lot of panic in the markets and over many forums on the Internet including reddit etc when the government of India/Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced plans to ban private crypto currencies. There has been huge speculation about this and a massive selloff in the Indian markets subsequently with BTCINR reaching a low for many weeks and most crypto currencies fell by 25% or more and some even fell to about 40% of their value overnight on the WazirX exchange (which is owned by Binance).

Some people are speculating that the Indian government is doing this to bring in their own Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) which they definitely seem to be working on and it will ban all other crypto currencies including Bitcoin and Ethereum.

While there maybe a small possibility that this might happen, here is a more realistic scenario of what might end up happening.

According to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, he said that all democratic countries should work together to ensure that the crypto currencies don't fall in the wrong hands and the young people of India should not be led into the wrong direction.

So this most likely means that the Indian government wants to ban private crypto currencies like Monero (XMR) who don't have a public ledger and whose wallet can never be seen by anyone except the person who holds the seed phrase themselves.

The concern seem to be mostly related to money laundering and funding of terrorist activities with funds which cannot be traced.

The Indian finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman also made a statement today saying that everyone who owns these currencies will be given a timeline to pull their funds out of their exchanges before they implement this rule.

In any case, do not panic! This might end up being a good thing overall and India may just be regulating cryptos which is going to be great for the industry as a whole. Even if they end up banning it completely, look how we rebounded from China!

If you're in this for the long haul, you should be good!