The chair of Infosys has said that India should embrace cryptocurrencies as an asset class.

According to a report from the Financial Times (FT), Nadan Nilekani said that cryptocurrencies should be encouraged as an asset to be bought and sold like a commodity.

But the Infosys chair said that crypto is too volatile and energy intensive to be used as a payment method, suggesting that India’s Unified Payments Interface digital payments infrastructure works better.

“Just like you have some of your assets in gold or real estate, you can have some of your assets in crypto,” he told the newspaper. “I think there’s a role for crypto as a stored value but certainly not in a transactional sense.”

Nilekani added that permitting people and business to get involved in the $1.5 trillion market would enable “the crypto guys to put their wealth into India’s economy.”

The Indian tech leader has in the past worked with India-based authorities to establish digital policies.

Nilekani also chaired a central bank committee on digital payments in 2019.

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