How to buy Cryptocurrencies in India?
Reading up about blockchain, understanding the risks associated with the market and the revolutionary tech (or the insane gains) might have made you interested to invest in cryptocurrencies.
Where can I buy cryptocurrencies in India?
Exchanges or Brokers are your answer.
Good News: There are exchanges accepting INR like Koinex, Coinome, Coindelta, Coinsecure and few more each having different set of pros and cons(few mentioned below). You can also buy cryptos from broker platforms like Unocoin or Zebpay.
Bad News: Most of them keep halting new signups (Koinex, Coindelta have temporarily halted new signups). Few exchanges have even paused INR deposits and withdrawals at times. They also tend do go offline during high volumes of trading activity.
We’ll take the example of Coinome as it has sign-ups, deposits and withdrawals of INR available as of 17th Jan, 2018.
Sign Up
- Verify your email id
- Submit Kyc details
1) Proof Of Identity: PAN
2) Bank Proof: This is the bank account which will receive your INR withdrawals.
3) Address Proof: Aadhaar, Passport
How to buy?
Before you purchase any cryptocurrencies you’ll have to deposit INR from your bank to the exchange. Net-banking/UPI via payment gateways can be used for this. INR deposits via NEFT/IMPS transfer have been halted in most exchanges.
Once your INR wallet is topped up, you can trade across crypto-INR market to purchase your favourite coin.
Select a market (BTC/INR)-> Enter the Amount in INR -> Hit Buy.
Coins Supported:
Koinex: Bitcoin, Ether, Bitcoin cash, Litecoin, Ripple
Coinome: Bitcoin, Bitcoin cash, Litecoin
Coindelta: Bitcoin, Ether, Bitcoin cash, Litecoin, OmiseGo, Qtum
Coinsecure: Bitcoin
Unocoin: Bitcoin
Zebpay: Bitcoin, Bitcoin cash (Ether, Litecoin coming soon)
Trading Basics
- Trading is controlled by markets supply and demand.
- Both buyers and sellers place a price at which they are willing to execute their trade.
- You place a buy order at a lower value than the highest sell order if you think there will be a seller who might be interested to sell at a cheaper cost and reverse for placing a sell order.
- When someone matches your buy/sell price your trade is executed.
- To instantly execute your trade you can place your buy order at a value equal to or slightly higher than the sell value and vice versa.
Be mindful of the fees
There are various kinds of fees before you end up with some bitcoins.
1) Deposit Fees: Deposits are normally charged at ~2% as the payment gateway fee. There are no deposit fees on Coinome.
2) Trade Fees:
- Koinex (~0.2% seller, ~0.25% buyer)
- Coinome (0.1% maker, 0.3% taker)
- Unocoin (0.7% on buy/sell plus 18% Gst on the fees)
- Zebpay (0.2% on buy/sell plus 18% Gst on the fees)
- Coindelta (0% maker, 0.3% taker)
- Coinsecure (0.4% on all trades)
Seller: An entity willing to sell an asset.
Buyer: An entity willing to buy an asset.
Maker: A maker is a party whose order exists on the order book before the trade occurs. Makers are incentivised because their orders make the liquidity in a market.
Taker: A taker is a party who places an order that matches the maker’s order. Takers are the ones who remove this liquidity by taking makers’ orders with their own. (as explained on coindelta)
There are more tokens like ADA, EOS, NEO… Seem to have great potential, but where are these?
A lot of coins/tokens are not available for INR trading market in exchanges, but you can buy them using bitcoin, ether on exchanges like Bittrex and Binance. More on that in the next article.
