India's Local Crypto and Web 3
- The offshore exchanges have been given two weeks to respond to the show cause notice.
- "All we are asking for is a level playing field," said Rajagopal Menon, Vice President of prominent Indian crypto exchange WazirX.
The Indian government's decision to block URLs of nine offshore exchanges and issue them show cause notices on Thursday came after an official request asking for the same from the Indian crypto and Web3 association's advocacy body, a letter viewed by CoinDesk shows.
The letter dated Dec. 16 was written by the Bharat Web3 Association's (BWA) Chairman, Dilip Chenoy, and was addressed to the Indian Finance Ministry's Department of Revenue Secretary Sanjay Malhotra.
The offshore exchanges have been given two weeks to respond to the show cause notice, which asks why actions against them shouldn't be taken, according to a source who spoke on condition of anonymity given the person wasn't authorized to speak on the matter. However, the letter from the BWA sought a one-month grace period for offshore exchanges to register with India's Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU), which falls under the Finance Ministry.
It wasn't immediately clear whether the BWA letter was single-handedly responsible for the action or whether the government would have taken the action unilaterally as well.
