As Parliament proceeds to discuss and debate norm or ban of cryptos and crypto exchanges in parliament from next week, India might have to be mindful that new global guidelines are being set on the management and permission of cryptos, especially given that terror financing and money laundering would become very easy without coordinated global rules.

Last month FATF issued updated norms and rules for the regulation and the monitoring of ‘virtual assets service providers’ and ‘virtual asset’. Their latest norms, which have been propagated among the government explain that VASPs and VAs come under the scope of FATF standards – which implies nations will be assessed on their performance on the latest guidelines set up by the FATF.

The norms brief about the ‘application of the FATF Recommendations to the competent authorities, nations, VASPs and other obliged organizations involved in VA activities, including financial institutions like securities broker-dealers and banks among others’.

The idea is to devise metrics for nations to abide by that makes it simpler to intercept and track terror financing/money laundering (TF/ML). In the lack of global coordination, cryptos, which remove the financial institution/bank as an intermediary, would make such financial flows outside the scope of global law enforcement authorities.