New Delhi: In hundreds of smaller cities and towns, a generation that has hardly any experience with stocks and bonds is heading straight to Bitcoin, Ethereum, Cardano and Solana.
The average age of the 11 million users of coinswitch kuber, a cryptocurrency trading app that didn’t exist 18 months ago, has 25, and 55% of them are outside big metros like New Delhi or Mumbai.
The widespread acceptance of digital tokens by millennials and generation Z is helping the industry move out of the shadows, a far cry from 2018 when the co-founders of a crypto Exchange was briefly in police custody because he dared to set up a kiosk in a shopping mall in Bangalore where people could swap their bitcoins for money. Now the business is all too public, and highly visible.
CoinSwitch Kuber has signed a popular Bollywood youth icon for an advertising campaign with the tagline, “Kuch Toh Badalega” – Kuch Badalega.
For CoinSwitch, which began as an aggregator of the best real-time prices for digital assets around the world, something is already in place.
In 2018, the fledgling venture could not play on its home turf as the Monetary Authority of India directed banks not to entertain customers dealing in virtual currency. In March last year itself, the Supreme Court overturned the ban.
CoinSwitch, whose app was released in June, acquired 11 million customers in 16 months. Investors took note of the startup: It recently became the first in the country to raise money from Silicon Valley venture capitalist Andreessen Horowitz at a valuation of $1.9 billion.
After coming into the mainstream in such a short span of time, the industry is demanding to regulate itself. “We have decided that we will show our face,” says Ashish Singhal, one of the three co-founders of CoinSwitch.
“Even if regulation hurts our business in the short term, it is better than being forced to operate in a gray area with little certainty and not much room for growth.”
Fears of illegality have risen after a court order last year that gave new life to a dying industry. But now that risk is diminishing. While Beijing last month announced its resolve to root out all transactions in virtual currencies, in the clearest terms, the consensus view is that New Delhi would be hesitant to take such an extreme step.
This is partly because the relationship between private business and the state is different in India, where politicians need corporate donations to contest expensive elections, and citizens don’t like being told by the government whether tuition, online gaming – or owning crypto assets – is bad for them.
But in part the industry’s confidence stems from the belief that policymakers have been persuaded to benefit from blockchain-based innovation for the economy.
iSPIRT, an influential Bangalore-based think tank, is advising India to close the $250 billion funding gap for small and medium-sized firms and make Wall Street decentralized for everyone on the Internet, as Balaji Srinivasan said. Embrace the growing sector of finance. , formerly the chief technology officer of Coinbase Global Inc., America’s largest crypto exchange, describes it.
“As a country, we missed Internet 1.0,” says Singhal. “We gave Google and Microsoft world-class talent, including their current CEOs, but we didn’t create those titans. With blockchain, we can build some global giants.”
Still, the widespread adoption of crypto trading is making authorities – especially central banks – uneasy.
CoinSwitch isn’t the only company that uses celebrity endorsements ahead of Diwali, the traditional gold buying season.
According to Bloomberg News, executives recently met Amitabh Bachchan and informed the Bollywood superstar about his concerns over his brand-ambassador deal with CoinDCX, another Indian crypto exchange.
Current speculative enthusiasm could use some tinkering, though it’s too late to try something more drastic. It would not be fair for Generation Z investors to keep the entire asset class out of bounds. “They grew up on the internet,” says Sharan Nair, chief business officer at CoinSwitch.
“There are many technocrats like us who love to solve problems in the crypto world by contributing code. What can they do as shareholders of a bank whose website they don’t like?
According to a survey by data analytics firm Kantar, around 83% of urban Indians are aware of digital currencies, while 16% actually have them.
Many want more – The draw of crypto is now half as powerful as that of mutual funds, a product with which older generations have a deep familiarity.
It provides a glimpse of what an investor portfolio will look like in the future: a mix of digital assets and traditional financial products. Even without the reflected light of Bollywood stars, India’s crypto industry is not going dark again.
The average age of the 11 million users of coinswitch kuber, a cryptocurrency trading app that didn’t exist 18 months ago, has 25, and 55% of them are outside big metros like New Delhi or Mumbai.
The widespread acceptance of digital tokens by millennials and generation Z is helping the industry move out of the shadows, a far cry from 2018 when the co-founders of a crypto Exchange was briefly in police custody because he dared to set up a kiosk in a shopping mall in Bangalore where people could swap their bitcoins for money. Now the business is all too public, and highly visible.
CoinSwitch Kuber has signed a popular Bollywood youth icon for an advertising campaign with the tagline, “Kuch Toh Badalega” – Kuch Badalega.
For CoinSwitch, which began as an aggregator of the best real-time prices for digital assets around the world, something is already in place.
In 2018, the fledgling venture could not play on its home turf as the Monetary Authority of India directed banks not to entertain customers dealing in virtual currency. In March last year itself, the Supreme Court overturned the ban.
CoinSwitch, whose app was released in June, acquired 11 million customers in 16 months. Investors took note of the startup: It recently became the first in the country to raise money from Silicon Valley venture capitalist Andreessen Horowitz at a valuation of $1.9 billion.
After coming into the mainstream in such a short span of time, the industry is demanding to regulate itself. “We have decided that we will show our face,” says Ashish Singhal, one of the three co-founders of CoinSwitch.
“Even if regulation hurts our business in the short term, it is better than being forced to operate in a gray area with little certainty and not much room for growth.”
Fears of illegality have risen after a court order last year that gave new life to a dying industry. But now that risk is diminishing. While Beijing last month announced its resolve to root out all transactions in virtual currencies, in the clearest terms, the consensus view is that New Delhi would be hesitant to take such an extreme step.
This is partly because the relationship between private business and the state is different in India, where politicians need corporate donations to contest expensive elections, and citizens don’t like being told by the government whether tuition, online gaming – or owning crypto assets – is bad for them.
But in part the industry’s confidence stems from the belief that policymakers have been persuaded to benefit from blockchain-based innovation for the economy.
iSPIRT, an influential Bangalore-based think tank, is advising India to close the $250 billion funding gap for small and medium-sized firms and make Wall Street decentralized for everyone on the Internet, as Balaji Srinivasan said. Embrace the growing sector of finance. , formerly the chief technology officer of Coinbase Global Inc., America’s largest crypto exchange, describes it.
“As a country, we missed Internet 1.0,” says Singhal. “We gave Google and Microsoft world-class talent, including their current CEOs, but we didn’t create those titans. With blockchain, we can build some global giants.”
Still, the widespread adoption of crypto trading is making authorities – especially central banks – uneasy.
CoinSwitch isn’t the only company that uses celebrity endorsements ahead of Diwali, the traditional gold buying season.
According to Bloomberg News, executives recently met Amitabh Bachchan and informed the Bollywood superstar about his concerns over his brand-ambassador deal with CoinDCX, another Indian crypto exchange.
Current speculative enthusiasm could use some tinkering, though it’s too late to try something more drastic. It would not be fair for Generation Z investors to keep the entire asset class out of bounds. “They grew up on the internet,” says Sharan Nair, chief business officer at CoinSwitch.
“There are many technocrats like us who love to solve problems in the crypto world by contributing code. What can they do as shareholders of a bank whose website they don’t like?
According to a survey by data analytics firm Kantar, around 83% of urban Indians are aware of digital currencies, while 16% actually have them.
Many want more – The draw of crypto is now half as powerful as that of mutual funds, a product with which older generations have a deep familiarity.
It provides a glimpse of what an investor portfolio will look like in the future: a mix of digital assets and traditional financial products. Even without the reflected light of Bollywood stars, India’s crypto industry is not going dark again.
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