The cryptocurrency market is developing at a fast pace in India. Educating investors about the wide use of cryptocurrency and its benefits is one of the challenges India’s largest and safest cryptocurrency exchange CoinDCX has handled quite easily. Bitcoinworld.co.in caught up with CoinDCX CEO and Co-Founder Sumit Gupta to understand his journey to make it big and the current scenario of the cryptocurrency market in India.
Take us through your journey
Neeraj and I started our journey in crypto space by being traders. In 2017, there were many global crypto exchanges but very few Indian exchanges. We started trading in all the exchanges and tried to understand which one was better in terms of usability, features, etc. While trading on Indian and many global exchanges, we encountered a big challenge of lack of liquidity.
The cryptocurrencies were a new asset class and they were on their price discovery journey. Many speculators, investors entered the market and faced many issues like massive spreads, slow order execution, and overall bad trading experience.We decided to solve all these problems by bringing the highest liquidity from the world’s top volume generating cryptocurrency exchanges like Binance, Huobi Global, etc. It helped CoinDCX traders to trade inexhaustibly and unlimitedly with a robust orderbook.
We started CoinDCX to enable global financial inclusion by building a global fin-tech movement in crypto. We started by building a lite crypto exchange with high liquidity. This is how CoinDCX was born which has now become India’s largest cryptocurrency exchange.
We have brought all the crypto-trading products under a single roof. The products are designed for all types of traders keeping their experience, risk tolerance, and frequency of trading in consideration.
CoinDCX offers users a single-point access to a diverse suite of crypto-based financial products and services such as Spot which gives access to users to trade cryptocurrencies across 500+ markets, and Insta which provides fiat onboarding from INR to crypto.
Other products include Lend wherein users can earn 12.78% APR; Margin- that offers up to 6x leverage trades across more than 250 markets and Stake where users can earn passive income by HODLing their cryptos.
Since when did you get yourself into the cryptocurrency market?
With Bitcoin gaining traction in 2016, I was intrigued by #crypto space and got involved in crypto trading. A very fortunate case of serendipity, when I found out, Neeraj was also involved in crypto, at the time.
Neeraj and I met in Kota when we were preparing for the IIT entrance exam. We became good friends while preparing for our entrance exams and later got into IIT Bombay (different batch year). Ending up in the same college, further strengthened our friendship. Around that time, we both started investing and trading in cryptocurrencies.
What is your assessment of the market currently
The cryptocurrency market in India has enormous potential and it’s just getting started. The Reserve Bank of India placed a ban on cryptocurrency banking and settlement back in April 2018. This has curtailed the growth of the Indian crypto space and its infrastructure development. Unfortunately, a lot of cryptocurrency traders who showed interest at that time were also scared away. CoinDCX was launched two days after the RBI announced its banking ban, which meant that we had to innovate in order to bring a safe, reliable, yet compliant way of trading cryptocurrencies to our users.
In March 2020, the Indian Supreme Court lifted the RBI’s banking ban and the Indian crypto space has grown by leaps and bounds in a few short months. Those who were discouraged by the banking ban returned to the market. We are also seeing an influx of foreign investors into the Indian crypto market, showing its great potential. This is unsurprising. With some of the highest rates of mobile penetration in the world, a deep pool of development talent, and a tech-savvy population hungry for knowledge for the asset class, we have Kickstarter our way to becoming a global crypto hub.
While crypto trading in India has begun revitalization, there are still a lot of questions surrounding the actual rules and regulations surrounding crypto trading. Crypto traders will benefit from the clear direction for their safety and protection, while crypto businesses and industry investors will have guardrails so that they know how to build out their operations and invest their money.
(Note: This is the first part of the interview. Part 2/2 will be published in due course)
