Jan 18 2024, 08:15
Ban on Binance, KuCoin, et al. Will this be a turning point for Indian crypto exchanges?
Having taken a hard blow as trading volumes plummeted by 90% last year following a change in tax regime, domestic crypto platforms have been struggling to stage a comeback. Can this be their turning point?
Indian crypto exchanges have had a busy fortnight after the Financial Intelligence Unit - India (FIU IND), which falls under the finance ministry, issued show cause notices to nine offshore cryptocurrency platforms late last month for non-compliance with the country's anti-money laundering rules.
Crypto unicorns CoinSwitch and CoinDCX announced last week that they will start taking crypto deposits, and the latter is working on withdrawals as well. Meanwhile WazirX, which always gave cryptocurrency traders the option to deposit in crypto, said it is working on crypto withdrawals for its larger userbase. CoinDCX went even a step further by allocating USD1 million to help investors move their assets from "non-compliant offshore exchanges" and announced a 1% bonus for all crypto deposits made between January 9 and January 17.
On Monday, much to the chagrin of foreign players, Apple pulled out some of their platforms from its App Store. By Saturday, the apps of Binance, KuCoin, Bitfinex, Huobi and Krake were removed from Google's PlayStore, and their URLs were not accessible.
According to industry experts, the FIU notice and the iPhone maker's decision are expected to work in favour of domestic crypto exchanges, some of which have already reported a spike in deposits. CoinDCX told ET Prime that it recorded a 2,000% jump in remittances while CoinSwitch said it registered a 30%-35% rise.
Contrary to this, their trading volumes have hardly seen significant increase, according to data sourced from Crebaco.
source: et
Jan 19 2024, 08:39