27/06/2018
While everyone is seriously/rightfully concerned about the RBI ringfencing applicability on Individual accounts, the fact is that it is very hard to monitor and arrive at a conclusive reason to start identifying and deterministically classifying millions of individual bank accounts at a point when banks are dealing with far larger issues. So while the individual account enforcement will happen piece meal, but in general, whole sale account identification and shutdown is completely detrimental to banks and something which they will not be inclined to chase. In fact, nearly every major european bank, many american banks and most south east asian banks have also posted such notices for a while now and never carried out wide shutdowns (though they have been quick to close credit instruments for crypto trading). Crypto trading continues to grow unabated in both p2p and centralized fiat supporting exchanges. Incidentally, when we speak of regulation, besides Indian local laws, India is also a member body in FATF under which in May (in Europe), even things like Crypto wallets (and hence even crypto pair trading) came under inclusion and have far reaching ramnifications for how most systems are designed today. In India, whethar exchanges switch to side stepping (pure dex) or full compliance (licensing/aml registry etc) remains to be seen basis the policy statement next month.
Nishant Ahuja