Agency Report

India’s government will introduce a bill to ban private cryptocurrencies and create a framework for a central bank-backed digital money, parliament said in a shock announcement late Tuesday.

The proposed bill “seeks to prohibit all private cryptocurrencies in India”, the Lok Sabha said, and comes after Prime Minister Narendra Modi warned last week that Bitcoin presents a risk to younger generations and could “spoil our youths” if it ends up “in the wrong hands”.

It is the latest of such move by a major emerging economy, after China declared all cryptocurrency transactions illegal in September.

India’s cryptocurrency market has boomed since the country’s Supreme Court overturned a previous ban in April last year, growing more than 600 percent over the past year according to research by Chainalysis.

Between 15 and 100 million people in Asia’s third-largest economy are estimated to own cryptocurrencies, with total holdings in the billions of dollars.