Hundreds of small towns and cities in India are embracing Bitcoin, Ethereum, Cardano, and Solana with a generation that has no experience with stocks and bonds.
The inrease in adoption can be easily illustrated with the growth of the popularity of a cryptocurrency trading app CoinSwitch Kuber, which was unheard of 18 months ago, and which now has 11 million users on average. 55% of the users are located outside large urban areas such as New Delhi or Mumbai.
New Millenials And Generation Z Investments In The Emerging Crypto Market
The growing acceptance of digital tokens by millennials and Generation Z is helping the industry emerge from the shadows. This contrasts with an incident last year when exchange cofounders were briefly in police custody for setting up a kiosk in a Bangalore shopping mall.
A popular Bollywood youth icon has been signed up by CoinSwitch Kuber for an ad campaign with the tagline, “Kucch toh badlega” – something is going to change now and is calling for more attention, urging the youth to be active in the market.
As a result, CoinSwitch, which began as a site that aggregated the best prices for digital assets around the world, has already achieved something.
While in 2018 , India’s monetary authority told banks not to serve customers who used virtual currency, a Supreme Court decision overturned the ban in March last year.
Enjoying the more favorable conditions, CoinSwitch has released its app in June and has since acquired 11 million users… that is 11 million users in 16 months. Besides, the company recently raised money from Silicon Valley venture capitalist Andreessen Horowitz for a valuation of $1.9 billion, the first of its kind in the country. Such investments will further stimulate the brand awareness and the crypto adoption in the country.
CoinSwitch Urges The Government For New Regulations
And already a short time after becoming mainstream, the growing sector itself demands regulation. “It’s time for us to show our face,” says Ashish Singhal, one of CoinSwitch’s three cofounders.
“Even if regulation harms our business in the short run, it’s better than being forced to operate in a gray area with little certainty and not much room for growth.”
Fears of being outlawed have swirled since last year’s court order that gave the dying industry new life. But that risk is now receding.
In contrast to Beijing, which last month announced unequivocally that it would ban all transactions involving virtual currencies, there is widespread consensus that New Delhi would hesitate to take such an extreme step.
Different countries have different rules for cryptocurrency trading. In India, the rules are changing.
In part, this is due to the different relationship between private business and the state in India, where politicians need corporate monies for expensive elections, while citizens dislike being told whether tutoring, online gaming, or even owning cryptocurrency should be recommended for them.
New Regulations for Cryptocurrency Trading
Industry leaders are waiting for the government to announce the new regulations on cryptocurrency trading. The industry‘s confidence stems from the belief that policymakers have been convinced of the benefits of blockchain-based technology for the community.
Balaji Srinivasan, former chairman of the Bank of India, is urging India to embrace the emerging field of decentralized finance to close a $250 billion funding gap for small and mid-size firms on the internet, a Wall Street for all.
Singhal states: “We, as a country, missed out on internet 1.0. We gave world-class talent to Google and Microsoft, including their current CEOs, but we didn’t create those titans. With blockchain, we can build some global giants.”
Promoting The Global Gians In the Crypto Industry
“Many are techies like us who like 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?”
Source ’Millennials pull crypto out of shadows in India’