Recently, Cryptocurrencies have become a hot cake for every Indian investor. People are showing immense interest in cryptocurrency investment. India has very limited cryptocurrency exchange platforms that allow buying and selling of digital currencies. Among these platforms, WazirX, CoinDCX, and Coin Switch Kuber saw a spike in their user base. Today, we are going to discuss CoinDCX. How it emerged as a leading crypto exchange platform recently.
Initial Struggles of CoinDCX
Sumit Gupta, co-founder, and CEO of CoinDCX talked about the journey of the crypto exchange platform. When the platform was initiated in 2018, the Reserve Bank Of India(RBI) gave a big jolt to crypto companies in India by putting a banking ban. That was a difficult time for startups like CoinDCX. Remembering about the battle with RBI in court, Sumit said:
“Success and growth have not been easy for us. When CoinDCX started in the year 2018, the same year the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) put a banking ban on transactions for cryptocurrency, which led to the shutdown of several companies in the crypto space. We were one of the few players that decided to contest the move of the banking regulator in the court.”
In India, there are still no proper regulations for crypto exchange. But a few years back, it was not even possible to invest in cryptocurrency from India. It was March 2020 when the Supreme Court of India gave a big relief to crypto investors in India by lifting the ban on the crypto exchange.
Supreme Court decision gave a big boost for Indian crypto investors due to three major reasons. First, cryptocurrency was showing exponential growth worldwide. In 2020, major cryptocurrencies showed 80% growth in their values. Second, Indian investors found few platforms including CoinDCX for investment purposes. Third, big business giants like Pay Pal, Tesla, Visa, etc came in support of cryptocurrencies.
All these events helped CoinDCX to reach a trading value of $1.5 billion per month.
Bitcoin and Ethereum saw an exponential surge in their values. Both cryptocurrencies saw a rise of 159% and 337% respectively in more than a year. XRP, another cryptocurrency, surged by 221% in value year to date. Cryptocurrency boom helped CoinDCX in growing its user base from 150k to 400k in the last 15 months.
Growth of CoinDCX
As per Coinmarketcap.com research, CoinDCX helps in a trading volume of $96 million per day as of May 15. Neeraj Khandelwal and Sumit Gupta, co-founders of CoinDCX, have claimed that their crypto exchange platform has crossed $10 billion transaction value in February 2021.
They further revealed that CoinDCX is processing approximately $1.5 billion value transactions per month recently. That is huge growth within a year. In April 2020, the platform was handling $0.5 billion trading volume per month. Then in January 2021, it became $1 billion. And now from April 2021 onwards, it is clocking a transaction volume of above $1.5 billion.
Talking about recent growth, Sumit said:
“We have witnessed a 4x growth, quarter-on-quarter, in daily active user base and we aim to add 50 million Indians soon. CoinDCX, which started with 50 tokens listed on its exchange, has 500 plus coins and thousand plus trading pairs listed on the platform.”
CoinDCX Plans
Compared to other crypto spaces in India, CoinDCX is the only platform that has raised funding in three different rounds in less than a year. Overall, it has raised $19 million. Polychain Capital, Bain Ventures, Bitmex, Coinbase Ventures, DG, Jump Capital, Uncorrelated Ventures, Mehta Ventures, and Alex Pack are the major investors that showed interest in CoinDCX.
Currently, DCX has 100 employees that are three times more than last year’s workforce. By the end of 2021, the company plans to have around 200 staff in total. The startup also launched its crypto product named Insta that saw a growth of 38% in the last 2 years. In terms of liquidity, CoinDCX is the largest crypto exchange platform in India.
What are CoinDCX plans? And how will it attract more investors? Answering these questions, Neeraj said:
“As an exchange, our objective has been to make the user experience as simple as conventional share trading. In a bid to help novel investors adopt cryptocurrency as a potential asset class, we have also launched CoinDCX Go – an app to invest in cryptocurrencies. With the app, we are eyeing mass adoption among beginner investors in crypto, especially millennials, and aim to onboard 50 million Indians.”
He further added:
“Additionally, we are in the constant process of advancing the app’s functionality to give first-time users an easy and efficient investing experience.”
Future of Crypto in India
In India, there is a lot of uncertainty about the future of cryptocurrencies. RBI is still firm on its stand to ban all crypto transactions. The government also placed a bill against cryptocurrencies in February parliamentary session.
CoinDCX is continuously in touch with the government and other stakeholders for a positive framework related to digital currency transactions.
Sumit said:
“We have also been running a campaign to drive industry dialogues and awareness among the policymakers and investors. The idea was to highlight the size of the crypto ecosystem in the country, and the financial opportunities for millions of Indian investors, such that the regulators will usher sensible and positive regulations for the industry.”
And CoinDCX efforts bring some positive vibes from government officials. Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman and the Minister of State for Finance, Anurag Thakur both gave positive statements about the future of crypto exchange in India. They said that we will debate with an open mind about the crypto exchange issue in India and will keep crypto investors’ interests protected in the bill.
Sumit considers it very good news for the crypto environment in India.
He said:
“This is welcome news for the industry. At CoinDCX we have always reiterated the need for smart regulations, taxation, and transparency for our sector. We will continue with our dialogues with the Indian government, the finance ministry, and its committee, as we believe the market has matured to a point that we usher in smart regulations in the best interest of the investors and the economy as a whole.”
But, CoinDCX should not ignore its major rival WazirX that has shown exponential growth in recent times. The startup should provide a better user experience and deals for its user base to stay in the competition.
Read also: Dogecoin Demand Crashes WazirX Platform, Delays Transactions
