Bitcoin Scene in India

India, the largest democracy in the world with population of 1.3 billion. Surely, bitcoin must be booming here. Not quite ! Lets see why

The Ecosystem

• BTCXIndia - India’s leading bitcoin exchange, based in Hyderabad. One of the oldest exchange around with good and reliable service. According to their website they have Banking-Grade policies on Anti-Money-Laundering (AML) and Customer Validation, ensuring we comply with governmental outlines.
• Unocoin - India’s most popular bitcoin wallet, based in Bangalore. They are like the coinbase of India, and allow you to buy / sell bitcoin. Have merchant integration also.
• Coinsecure - One of the newer exchanges around, based in Hyderabad. Slowly building traction/volume. The founder is the moderator of India subforum on bitcointalk and has worked a lot of bitcoin education in India.
• Zebpay - Mobile bitcoin wallet and exchange, based in Ahmedabad. This is not a open source/decentralized wallet and funds are stored on their central server. Convenient for transferring small amount of bitcoins using mobile number.
• Blockonomics - Bitcoin financial tracker, based in Hyderabad. Only blockchain based service in India. Useful for managing and tracking bitcoin addresses/transactions.
• BitcoinRates - One the the newer services that is worth mentioning. Shows quick view of exchange rate / arbitrage opportunity in India.

Volumes

Total BTC volumes in India is not publicly available , neither bitcoincharts nor bitcoinity has this data. Unocoin and Zebpay don’t publicly share their volume so this is just an estimate based on their website ranks.

Exchange Avg. 24 hour Volume

BtcXindia 150 BTC

Coinsecure 10BTC

LocalBitcoin 30BTC

Zebpay 250 BTC (Estimated)

Unocoin 200 BTC (Estimated)

Total 640BTC

Thou shall not pass !

The volume seems pretty low compared to the population of the country and seeing the boom of IT in India. One of the reasons for this is regulation.

India banking industry and transaction is tightly controlled by the Indian central bank RBI. Indian exchanges are in constant fear of being shutdown due to uncertainty in regulation. Many of them are self regulated, some have had income tax raids, some have shutdown and opened again.

Indian media and banks seem to deeply concerned about money-laundering using bitcoin, which is ironical. There seems to be legitimate ways of laundering money like cash, hawala and real-estate(which most politicians in India are invested in). Bitcoin is the illegal way to launder money. The fact that transactions are publicly viewable for everyone to see on blockchain doesn’t matter.

Future

RBI hasn’t talked much about regulation regarding bitcoin. Last year it issued a statement saying blockchain technology can help check counterfeiting. My gut feeling is that RBI doesn’t want to make noise for such low volumes. When the volumes get big, things will get interesting.

Tech entrepreneurs are booming in India and bitcoin has huge potential in the country with large volume of remittances and freelance community. Bitcoin startups in India have made huge strides in promoting and spreading the currency. Lets hope sanity prevails and tech innovation continues!