Snapshot:
- The Journey of the Indian Crypto Space.
- How the Mood of the Nation survey helped gauge the Indian Crypto scenario.
- How CoinDCX came to be.
Conversations around Crypto in India have always been an emotional rollercoaster since 2018. While bitcoin has been a part of the narrative since 2012, the larger Indian audience pivoted towards bitcoin and cryptocurrencies, when Bitcoin crossed its All Time High for the first time in 2017 end.
In 2017 year end, Bitcoin prices touched nearly $19,000 and the cryptocurrency world was never the same. With legacy banks and mainstream media dubbing it the next ‘Tulip bulb market bubble’, and retail investors entering the market by droves, it can be agreed upon that 2017 and early 2018 was a watershed moment in the history of Bitcoin.
In India, the story that was unfolding was a little different. In the 2018 budget session, the then Finance Minister Arun Jaitley declared that “virtual currencies were not a legal tender.” That one line changed the face of the Indian cryptocurrency roadmap for at least the next two years.
In April 2018, the Reserve Bank of India passed a diktat that prevented banks from working with cryptocurrency exchanges. While the cryptocurrency market fizzled to ashes, CoinDCX rose out of these ashes, as a phoenix.
CoinDCX burst onto the scene and we couldn’t have picked a more adverse time to begin our operations. With questions hanging in the air pertaining to regulations, unawareness, confusions, like a Damocles’ sword, we took the plunge to turn the crypto countryside into the thriving ecosystem that it is today.
Initially, when Neeraj and I started trading as crypto traders, we saw that the Indian crypto ecosystem was fragmented and liquidity was one of the most pressing challenges in the space. Turning that challenge into one of our strengths by aggregating liquidity from the top exchanges in the world, was our number one priority.
We created CoinDCX by aggregating liquidity from exchanges such as Binance, Huobi and HitBTC. While we started off as a crypto to crypto exchange, we soon realized that there were an increasing number of Indians who wanted an option to buy and sell crypto through fiat gateway. While there was a banking ban, we innovated and built Insta (in August 2018)- which was the fiat on ramp/off ramp gateway that enabled Indians to purchase crypto without any roadblocks.
While the next two years was spent in building the CoinDCX stable (in the midst of an unrelenting bear run), crypto in India, was given a fresh lease of life, when the Supreme Court overturned the banking ban in India in March 2020. We were the first Indian exchange to integrate banking transfers within the first 6 hours of the Supreme Court judgement. We kick-started our movement #TryCrypto which aimed to encourage 50 million Indians to onboard the crypto wagon. We organized one of India’s magnum opus trading competitions which saw 50,000 Indians join CoinDCX within the first 50 days.
Post the Supreme Court, we have seen our crypto industry scale up beyond our wildest dreams and the momentum has not lagged.
We understood that education is the prerequisite for adoption. Keeping that in mind, we introduced DCX Learn which helped novices and veterans understand the ins and outs of the crypto and blockchain industry.
However, we wanted to deep dive into the nitty gritty and find out how the average Indian feels about crypto. To find that, we carried out one of the most extensive surveys, ‘Mood of the Nation!’ and we found that nearly 60% Indians are hesitant to try crypto, due to the lack of a seamless option available.
Armed with that insight, CoinDCX– the easiest and safest to buy and sell crypto in India- came into being at the end of last year. This is a marketplace app, the latest offering from the CoinDCX stable, which will help Indians to buy the top 14 cryptocurrencies at the click of a button!
Looking at the year in retrospective, I can’t help but feel overwhelmed, thankful, gratified and humbled by how far we have come, despite prevailing adversities. Honestly, Neeraj and I could not have done it without the support of not just our team members, but also our wonderful crypto community, who has constantly supported us, through thick and thin!
Very grateful,
Sumit Gupta
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