CoinDCX, one of India’s premium cryptocurrency exchanges, has secured $3 Mn funding from clutch of international investors in series A round. American investment major Bain Capital and Polychain Capital & HDR Global Trading (parent company of Bitmex) were among the primary participants in the investment round.
Following the series A round, CoinDCX has become one of the first Indian cryptocurrency firms to raise funds after Supreme Court’s favorable ruling that allowed the Indian cryptocurrency firms to re-start their trading activities in the country.
The investment also demonstrated international investor’s growing confidence in the India’s highly nascent cryptocurrency industry following Apex court’s favorable judgment. This should potentially signal good news for Indian crypto startups.
Notably, Bitmex’s investment in the Indian market has come barely weeks after Binance announced that it has created a $50 Mn funding corpus for Indian blockchain startups.
CoinDCX said that it plans to use the funds for developing algorithm based trading and to launch a crypto-to-crypto trading product later this year.
Some of the other top Indian crypto exchanges, which are now expected to join to fundraising bandwagon, include CoinRecoil, Delta Exchange, BuyUCoin, WazirX and Koinex.
However, despite apex court’s favorable ruling, clouds of uncertainty still continue to loom large over India’s fledging cryptocurrency industry; especially because RBI has still not given up its battle against digital currencies, with India’s central bank reportedly planning to file a review petition in the apex court challenging its earlier decision.
Looking purely at statistics and numbers alone, India’s crypto market stood at approximately $12.9 Bn. But this was before RBI’s clampdown on cryptocurrency trading in April 2018. Since the ban and until apex court’s recent reprieve, the market value of Indian cryptocurrency industry has undoubtedly gone down significantly.
Notwithstanding RBI’s next move, Indian cryptocurrency industry’s long term success will also hinge on the mass adoption of virtual currencies. This observation was shared at a recent business conference by PayPal’s CTO, Sri Shivananda. Shivananda even supported cryptocurrencies for making online payments but maintained that virtual currencies still have a long way to go for mass adaption.