Bitcoin trades in India surge four times

CHENNAI: Indian cryptocurrency exchange and trading platforms have seen a 4x surge in the number of deposit requests. The rise came within 24 hours of Tesla’s announcement of buying Bitcoin worth $1.5 billion and that it may accept the cryptocurrency as a payment option.


Nischal Shetty, founder of Mumbai-based WazirX, a Bitcoin and cryptocurrency exchange and platform, said, “We saw transactions go up 300% after Tesla’s announcement.” Shetty tweeted “INR (rupee) deposit credit is delayed on WazirX. We’re getting a huge amount of deposit requests every minute. Please have patience, your deposit will be credited with some delays.”




Shetty said, “The cryptocurrency bill bans private cryptocurrency traders. Then the most affected will be the organised players, as the illegal ones will anyway find a way to operate. Sharan Nair, chief business officer at Bengaluru-based CoinSwitch Kuber, said transaction volumes had doubled after the Tesla announcement as compared to the daily average volume.

Darshan Bathija, CEO of Vauld, said the volume of transactions on its platform has doubled. “Compared to the day before, our trading volume doubled. We saw a 60% spike in new users, and 20% in returning users. We have seen a $10-million transaction volume in the last 24 hours, as compared to our daily average of $4-5 million. Rupee deposits have doubled from Rs 16 crore per day to Rs 30 crore today.”

Bathija said, “When large international markets come out with positive regulation on cryptocurrency and Bitcoin, India has taken the complete opposite stance. Their (rest of the world) interpretation of private virtual (crypto) currency is straightforward — not issued by any central bank.”

Lack of definite definition for private cryptocurrency in the recent bill has placed Indian traders and exchange platforms in a fix.

Unocoin’s CEO and co-founder Sathvik Vishwanath said, “We saw over 4,000 new registrations (depositors) to trade on our platform since morning, which is much higher than the 500-600 per day. The value of rupee deposit stood at Rs 4.5 crore within the first few hours of trade today and is expected to reach Rs 10 crore — which is equal to the trade value of 3-4 days. Every rupee that comes in ends up in Bitcoin purchase.”

With no access to officials currently, Unocoin’s CEO and co-founder Sathvik Vishwanath fears the bill could place one entity with the right to operate private cryptocurrency.