May 20 2021: Ahead of any formal instructions from the Reserve Bank of India, Indian banks appear to be turning the heat on crypto currency, halting transfers to crypto-related accounts and threatening such accounts with closure.
The banks are said to have asked the central payments system, tThe National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), to block crypto-related transactions. However, the agency refused to do it. (Economic Times, The Telegraph)
This is the latest chapter in the ongoing saga of whether the Indian government might crack down on cryptocurrencies, even as trading volumes in digital assets have exploded over the past 12 months.
In March 2020, the Supreme Court of India set aside the Reserve Bank of India’s banking ban on cryptocurrency trading. Since early this year, the Indian government has been mulling a ban on private cryptocurrencies. (CoinDesk)
Of late, the country’s central bank, the Reserve Bank of India, has been approaching banks and asking them to sever ties with crypto, according to a Thursday report by Reuters.
Crypto has been gaining fans in India recently, especially among the younger generation, which sees cryptocurrencies as a novel investment option, replacing gold that traditionally has been used to store family wealth. However, the country hasn’t come up with a consistent regulatory approach yet and rumors of a possible crypto ban have been hovering around India over the recent months. (Coindesk)
Singapore had proactively taken measures to prevent nefarious activity without impending technology innovation, which India could learn from, Blockchain and Crypto Assets Council (BACC) says at a virtual conference.
India’s beleaguered blockchain industry has finally got some solid support to ensure its survival, with an influential industry evangelist evoking the vision of a billion smartphones acting as gateways to the brave new world of decentralized finance. In this world, Wall Street's capabilities will be available to everyone, according to angel investor Balaji Srinivasan, formerly the chief technology officer at Coinbase Global Inc., the largest U.S. crypto exchange about to go public. “We could turn every phone into not just a bank account but a bonafide Bloomberg Terminal,” he writes on his blog.(Bloomberg)
Meanwhile, CoinDCX, India's largest and safest cryptocurrency exchange, and Solana, a high-performance blockchain protocol supporting builders, jointly launched a Virtual Hackathon on May 15 to encourage the crypto and blockchain community and expand the country's DeFi ecosystem.
India’s largest crypto currency exchange, WazirX has announced a new feature to streamline and provide a seamless crypto buying experience.
With a mission to make crypto accessible to everyone in India, this innovative feature is aimed to address the growing demand of new crypto investors, create more awareness on safe crypto trading practices and also familiarize the Indian masses with this new dimension of fintech. Despite the rapid growth of crypto adoption in India, millions of fence-sitters and potential crypto investors find it difficult to participate in crypto; lack of simplicity and ease of buying their first crypto are to be blamed for this. QuickBuy allows users to buy their first crypto seamlessly, quickly, and without any hidden charges.
A feature like QuickBuy is the need of the hour as it will bridge the gap between crypto adoption and the masses.The largest crypto exchange in India has recently doubled its users from 1 million to 2 million between January 2021 and March 2021; adds another million in April 2021.
With QuickBuy, WazirX aims to onboard the next 10 Million users on to its platform within this quarter.
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What is a crypto-currency?
Crypto-currency, or crypto is a digital asset designed to work
as a medium of exchange wherein individual coin ownership
records are stored in a ledger existing in a form of a
computerized database using strong cryptography to secure
transaction records, to controlthe creation of additional coins.
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