Zebpay, India's leading crypto-exchange, planning to shutdown its operations as cryptocurrency trading platform!
Indian government and Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has been continually showing cold-blooded attitude towards all cryptocurrency and their operations. The increase in popularity of virtual currencies in the late 2017 led to its price rise which eventually stimulated the government's stringent actions against it. In April 2018, RBI asked all banks to strictly not support or deal with any individual or businesses dealing with cryptocurrencies.
Legal war between RBI & Crypto-Excahnages
India's crypto-exchanges has started legal battle against RBI and other government agencies by moving them to court, in hope of getting a favorable justice. This hasn't paid them off as they expected and has been dragging for months. Indian Supreme Court is yet to rule on this matter. Unfortunately, this wait has turned out to be too much to deal with!
Despite regulatory and banking problems along our journey, we continued to look for solutions as we did not want India to miss the bus of digital assets that power the public blockchain. However, the recent past has been extremely difficult.
Zebpay
Zebpay was launched in the year 2015 and attracted many Indian investors towards virtual currencies. The exchange had an annual turnover of Rs. 500 crore in less than 2 years and hit 200,000 app downloads.
Every time prices increase, investors who were sitting on the fence and were skeptical do enter the ecosystem.
- Sandeep Goenka, co-founder of Zebpay.
In late 2017, Zebpay was introducing more than 300,000 new users into its platform every month.
Zebpay Shutdown
In December 2017, Indian government authorities started monitoring the affairs of various crypto-exchanges which resulted in Finance Ministry stepping in. RBI made strict policies against cryptocurrency investments and warned severe legal actions against investors who used it for tax evasions.
These measures had a global impact and contributed majorly towards the fall of cryptocurrency's worth in the first quarter of 2018. Many attacks and hacking practices made the investors panic which resulted in a global impact on cryptocurrency ecosystem.
The curb on bank accounts has crippled our, and our customers’, ability to transact business meaningfully. At this point, we are unable to find a reasonable way to conduct the cryptocurrency exchange business. As a result, we are stopping our exchange activities.
- Zebpay
Will Zebpay's decision make an impact on investors in cryptocurrency market?
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