India has historically been hostile towards digital currencies, with a central bank circular all but outlawing digital currency exchanges until the Supreme Court of India reversed that circular in 2019.
Since then volumes of digital currency traded in India have soared and the digital currency exchanges, which previously fled the country, have returned and have had been bolstering their capabilities.
One such exchange is CoinDCX, which has seen trading volumes jump 47% in Q1 2020. As a result of this CoinDCX has signed up BitGo to provide custody for their bitcoin. BitGo has a USD$100M Lloyds of London insurance policy for their combined hot/cold wallet approach to custody and serves customers including The Royal Mint, Bitstamp and Nexo.
Other digital currency exchanges are looking to enter the Indian market with Binance offering peer to peer trading from April 2020, launching a USD$50M Blockchain for India fund in March 2020 and advertising for a director of India. Kraken has also expressed interest in entering the Indian market.
India, with it's huge population and history of leapfrogging technology, coupled with high degree of technical literacy but very paper-based government and financial systems, represents one of the greatest opportunities for blockchain technology (well beyond just digital currency trading) and having proper foundations like clear custody of digital assets in place is an important step towards better adoption of the technology.
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