Coinbase, the largest US-based cryptocurrency exchange, disabled the feature to acquire bitcoin using the popular Unified Payments Interface payment instrument in India on Sunday, just three days after launching support for the popular payment instrument in India.
On Coinbase’s India services, UPI is an immediate real-time payment system designed by India’s National Payment Corporation to enable interbank transactions via mobile phone.
The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) is a special institution of the Reserve Bank of India, which is part of India’s Ministry of Finance.
For Indian customers, the exchange has already updated its payment options information on its website, recommending them to place sell orders using the Immediate Payment Service (IMP).
Will NPCI and Coinbase Work Together?
In a statement, Coinbase said it was committed to working with the NPCI and other appropriate authorities and was looking into alternate payment solutions.
On Friday, TechCrunch reported that it had asked Coinbase if it planned to keep enabling UPI payments as it worked with various authorities. The corporation did not respond to the request for information.
Other cryptocurrency exchanges in India have failed to offer UPI, the most frequent form of online payment in the nation, according to the statement from the payments agency, which is a special branch of India’s central bank.
Coinbase intends to more than treble its workforce in India this year, to around 1,000 people, according to Chief Executive Officer Brian Armstrong.
According to Pankaj Gupta, the company’s India site director, India will act as Coinbase’s tech center for global product development, with half of new hires being engineers.
India’s Massive Hiring
Around a quarter of the 2,000 professionals Coinbase expects to hire this year in engineering, product, and design will come from the South Asian country.
Despite Coinbase’s launch of its services, the NPCI indicated on April 7 that it did not recognize the legal standing of any cryptocurrency exchanges that used the Reserve Bank of India’s UPI.
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