February 8, 2019

‘India Wants Crypto’ Campaign Passes 100 Days With Growing Support

A social media campaign for positive cryptocurrency regulation in India has passed 100 days with growing support from the community. Despite the ongoing banking restriction imposed by the country’s central bank, local crypto exchanges are reporting increased volumes and optimism about the upcoming regulation.

Also read: Indian Supreme Court Moves Crypto Hearing, Community Calls for Positive Regulations

Campaign for Positive Crypto Regulation

Friday marks the 100th day of a Twitter campaign for positive cryptocurrency regulation for India. The CEO of local crypto exchange Wazirx, Nischal Shetty, began his campaign on Oct. 31 last year, coinciding with the 10th anniversary of Satoshi’s whitepaper. Each day he tweets to lawmakers urging them to introduce positive regulation for India using hashtags “Indiawantscrypto” and “Isupportcrypto.”

On Thursday, Shetty told news.bitcoin.com:

Every day there are 100s of retweets and likes and thousands of views.

The CEO proceeded to share his campaign stats. According to him, the 99 daily tweets up to Thursday have generated 1.48 million impressions, resulting in 57,374 user interactions such as retweets, replies, and likes.

The Message

Shetty explained that “With the bank ban in India it was important to surface the importance of India adopting crypto,” elaborating, “To do that, educating the government and the masses is a first step. This campaign’s objective is to spread awareness so that our government takes the right step towards crypto.”

His series of tweets began with the message: “Please bring positive regulations in crypto and over 5 million crypto Indians will be thankful to you. Youth of India have found a new way to make wealth & this is especially important when there are not enough jobs for everyone.” Among the Twitter accounts he regularly tags are those for the country’s Minister of Finance and Corporate Affairs, Arun Jaitley, and Narendra Modi, the Prime Minister of India.

Exchange Trading Volumes Growing

Wazirx published its January performance report on Wednesday, claiming that it has consistently reached 50 BTC in daily trading volume. This announcement follows another on Jan. 23 which states that “Within 6 months of P2P launch, we’ve crossed Rs. 100 crores [~$14 million] worth of P2P trades.”

Another local crypto exchange, Instashift, is also seeing positive growth. Marketing officer Jacob Mani revealed to news.bitcoin.com that his exchange’s Indian trading volume “is increasing day by day slowly with a lot of buyer and seller activity.” He added: “In the past two weeks, there were two days when [the number of] sellers were quite more than buyers. So, there is promising market activity in India.” Instashift operates in 45 countries including India.

In order to drum up more volume, some exchanges are offering customers bonuses for fiat deposits. Pocketbits, a crypto exchange launched on Feb. 8, 2017, for example, recently announced that it is giving a 0.25 percent bonus to customers for fiat deposits.

Positive Vibes

There is a growing vibe in the community that the Indian government will eventually introduce positive regulation. In January, the Indian Ministry of Finance invited reputed law firm Nishith Desai Associates to present their suggestions for crypto regulations. Citing that the law firm “got some good space to present the case,” Mani believes:

There is a feeling that something positive might come out soon from the supreme court.

Since the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) issued a circular banning regulated financial institutions from providing services to customers dealing with cryptocurrencies, many exchanges have launched exchange-escrowed P2P services which, according to them, have gained much popularity. The country’s supreme court is set to hear the petitions against the ban at the end of this month.

The committee headed by Subhash Chandra Garg, Secretary of Department of Economic Affairs under the Ministry of Finance, is reportedly in the final stage of drafting crypto regulation.

What do you think of this campaign for positive regulation in India? Let us know in the comments section below.

Images courtesy of Shutterstock.

Need to calculate your ₿itcoin holdings? Check our tools section.

Kevin Helms

A student of Austrian Economics, Kevin found ₿itcoin in 2011 and has been an evangelist ever since. His interests lie in ₿itcoin security, open-source systems, network effects and the intersection between economics and cryptography.

Published at Fri, 08 Feb 2019 11:55:37 +0000

You might be interested in …

March 22, 2018

Nach Sicherheitslücke: Ledger Nano S unbedingt updaten!

BTC-ECHO Nach Sicherheitslücke: Ledger Nano S unbedingt updaten! Ein 15-Jähriger entdeckte eine Schwachstelle in der Ledger Nano S Wallet, mit der er Transaktionen umleiten und sowohl Seeds als auch Recovery-Passwörter manipulieren kann. In Zusammenarbeit mit […]

March 12, 2018

Cryptocurrency Exchanges Are Making Millions from Just Listing Coins

bitcoin News Cryptocurrency Exchanges Are Making Millions from Just Listing Coins Running a major cryptocurrency exchange is a lucrative business. Coinbase is reported to have made over $1 billion last year, and Binance is on […]

September 8, 2017

An Interview With Kavita Gupta, ConsenSys’s Pick to Oversee Its New $50M Venture Fund

ConsenSys, an Ethereum production studio based in Brooklyn, NY, is launching a $50 million venture arm, and it has picked Kavita Gupta to run it. Gupta’s job will be to oversee the new venture and help structure deals with the startups.

It is not uncommon for companies with investment capital to form their own investment arm. For the most part, the goal is to fund startups that could drive value for the parent company down the line. And, as a strategic investor, ConsenSys Ventures will be actively involved in developing startups from an early stage.

bitcoin Magazine spoke with Gupta on the phone earlier this week. She was in New York getting ready to dash off to San Francisco. ConsenSys has offices in Brooklyn and in San Francisco, and Gupta will be splitting her time between both of those offices.

She explained she will be working closely with Joseph Lubin, the founder of ConsenSys and one of the early founders of Ethereum. And, she added, naturally, ConsenSys Ventures will be looking to invest in Ethereum-based startups.

“We are looking at companies already, and we are going to deploy this as soon as we get green signals from a lawyer on the structure. Everything else is place,” said Gupta, who will be talking more about the fund at Women in STEM in San Francisco on Monday.

When asked about the overall goals of the venture, she responded, “I think, to Joe, being one of the co-founders of Ethereum, what really matters is how to basically accelerate this revolution. He wants the smartest entrepreneurs to create applications on it, to use it and start ingraining that work into our ecosystem to create companies.”

To that end, ConsenSys Ventures will be looking to invest in pre-seed, seed, and equity stage companies, she explained, adding that the fund will also be investing in pre-token sales, if the entrepreneurs decide to go the initial coin offering (ICOs) route.

Gupta described her role as overseeing the entire process while also being deeply involved with structuring deals. “Like any managing partner, I will be basically doing due diligence, looking at the companies, and structuring the deal. And, at the same time, making sure all the fiduciary duties are done,” she said. “With respect to making the decisions, it is going to be me and Joe working very closely.”

She indicated, finding good startups to invest in would not be an issue. “Once you are in ConsenSys, which is pretty much the center of the blockchain space, you don’t really have to go out looking for great companies,” she said, adding that the team was currently “looking deeply” at four to five startups, but nothing had been finalized yet.

She said she will leave the decision as to whether or not a startup should launch an ICO, up to the entrepreneurs themselves. “We help them create a business. We help them create an idea. I don’t think we are really pushing or saying that every company has to go for token sales. It makes sense for some companies, and for others, it doesn’t make sense. We want to support the entrepreneurs in whatever they do.”

Strategic funding is different than straight venture capital funding, she emphasized. “We want to believe that it is different than the traditional investment because it is sort of like a VC hedge fund. All of the companies are coming to you at a very early stage, and we want to be involved in shaping the company, with respect to business, operations, hiring, and how they are going to make money.”

As part of that, the ConsenSys Ventures will offer a range of support. “We also work as a strategic investor, helping you out both with respect to the technology solutions, because we have access to the ConsenSys ecosystem, and also to deliver the company, because a lot of people forget they have to deliver the company after that.”

She also pointed out that ConsenSys Ventures was part of a natural evolution. Two years ago, ConsenSys launched as a way to build out ideas on top of the Ethereum network. Earlier this year, ConsenSys launched ConsenSys Academy to start training engineers in how to do that work on their own. Now, ConsenSys Ventures is sort of a middle ground, offering support, but still letting entrepreneurs do their own thing.

“Now across the world, entrepreneurs are capable of building and designing — coding their own systems on Ethereum. They don’t necessarily need ConsenSys 100 percent, so how do we collaborate with them? I think Consensys Ventures is the best way to do it.”

A native of India, Gupta is a 2015 recipient of the U.N. Social Finance Innovator Award. In addition to working at the World Bank, where she headed the organization’s youth innovation fund, she has more than 10 years of experience in impact investment across a variety of companies, including McKinsey, HSBC and International Finance Corp.

She has worked in the U.S., the Middle East, South Asia and Africa. She most recently led mission investing for the family foundation of Alphabet Inc. executive Eric Schmidt.

The post An Interview With Kavita Gupta, ConsenSys’s Pick to Oversee Its New $50M Venture Fund appeared first on Bitcoin Magazine.