In recent times, the reduction in overall availability of philanthropic capital and the continuous pressure towards efficient use of limited funds has driven the social finance space to explore innovative ways of deploying the available limited funds. The industry has relied on leveraging newer technologies and has explored a few innovative financial instruments in the search for maximizing impact or the efficiency in achieving outcomes. However, certain novel global practices in this space including the leveraging of fintech and emergent technologies to increase the ease and impact of philanthropic work, along with decrease in costs have not yet been explored in India for a myriad of reasons including legal uncertainty.

Globally, there are successful projects by UNICEF and the World Food Programme that showcase some of the best ways in which crypto assets may be leveraged. Even in the Indian context, over USD 1 Billion were crowdsourced through collection and pooling of crypto assets, creating a rapid response fund, that was routed into India toward COVID-19 relief. However, direct donations in form of crypto assets is not yet seen as a popular means of social finance in India. The current Indian policy mindset appears to be that while blockchain is a useful technology, crypto assets are not something to be promoted, which may not factor the potential for positive use cases of crypto assets. While the Indian Government has recently announced a regime for taxation of virtual digital assets, on the regulatory front, the nature and classification of VDAs is still in limbo.

In this regard, we along with the Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) released of our publication, Social Finance: Leveraging crypto assets in India, on February 24, 2022 during the conference, NFT India – A Peep into the future of NFT in India, organised by IAMAI. We are pleased to share the copy of our publication with you.

Keeping in mind that no technology is inherently good or bad and that it can be used to create both a positive or a negative impact on society, this paper intends to showcase the potential for positive use cases of crypto assets in the Indian social finance or philanthropic space based on successful use cases globally. The paper will analyse the various laws that would potentially apply if the successful global use cases were sought to be replicated in the Indian social finance space. The paper would also make policy recommendations regarding the changes required to the current legal framework to make it a favourable ecosystem that enables activities that benefit those whose need it the most in India.

Hope you find the paper useful.

Please click here to access our paper.

For any help or assistance, please email us on ndaconnect@nishithdesai.com.