Vijay C Roy & Seema Sachdeva
THE sheer scale of it is an eye-opener — India now has 15 homegrown cryptocurrency exchange platforms that enable trading and selling, with more than 1.5 crore users. At 10.07 crore, India also has the highest number of crypto owners in the world, according to broker discovery and comparison platform BrokerChooser. The United States and Russia rank a distant second and third, respectively. Going by the number of crypto owners in terms of population, India ranks fifth.
A rapid rise in investments and several new domestic launches followed the Reserve Bank of India’s clarification around cryptocurrency in May this year, asking regulated banks not to warn customers against cryptocurrency trading under its 2018 order, which banned such transactions. The three-year-old RBI circular was set aside in 2020 following the Supreme Court’s intervention on a petition filed by the Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) and crypto exchanges.
If substantial profits fall within the realm of possibility, so are the chances of huge losses and fraud in cryptocurrency trading — and there is no regulatory authority the investor can turn to, for now. The risk is entirely his or hers. A capital gains tax of 30 per cent, however, will be levied on the profits made.
Driving the robust growth are young Indians; those aged below 35, in fact, form the core of the investors in popular cryptocurrency exchanges like CoinSwitch Kuber, Zebpay, WazirX, UnoCoin, CoinDCX, and many more.
Like the Class XII commerce student from Ludhiana who is already a veteran of crypto trading at 16. A keen investor in Dogecoin, he’s made a neat profit out of his pocket money, but is wary of his name coming out. “I’ve kept it a secret even from my family; they will not approve, it’s too risky for them,” he says. The teenager has been selling the coins, ordering goods from China and then making money out of…
