Bitcoin Forum

India’s Best-Funded Bitcoin Exchange is Running Low on Cash and Employees

India’s regulatory uncertainty on cryptocurrencies has taken a toll on Bengaluru-based exchange Unocoin forcing it to lay off employees. According to The Economic Times, the bitcoin exchange has laid off over a dozen employees and now only has 14 employees remaining.

https://www.ccn.com/unocoin-bitcoin-exchange-staff-banking-ban-india

I've never heard of this exchange before, but after doing some googling I can see that it is indeed one of the largest Indian cryptocurrency exchange platforms. (Even Andreas M. Antonopoulos is following them on twitter). It is strange, then, that Unocoin is not listed on CoinMarketCap. Does anyone know why? From what I know, they accept only Indian Rupee. Can it be the reason for not being listed on CMC?

Honestly this isn't surprising a single bit because one minute you hear crypto is banned in india and expect these services to flourish....not a chance unless the regulators down there make the business environment conducive then can these exchanges and all remain afloat.

No one will trade on an exchange that is located in a country where crypto is banned. They run the risk of seeing their coins confiscated by the government in India

Maybe, since it do only accepts Indian Rupees and not having any USD option then that might be a reason.This is also my first encounter on hearing out this
exchange and it is indeed a popular one but im not really surprised that they do face up such problem yet we know that Crypto is banned on India.Why they have pursued to continue such venture?

It is not only that Indian platform, but the collapse of Bitcoin's price to $ 5000 and volatility as well as more hodlers makes the acceptance of BTC unstable and may lead to heavy losses.
India has no clear regulatory rules and despite the demands, the government is delaying regulation, which makes it worse.
So we must look at the bright side and it is the continuation of Unocoin.

Because it is famous in India.
I think Andreas M. Antonopoulos followed them as they held many meetings discussions.

Being an Indian resident, I can say that the crypto is not banned outright (at least not yet). But the government and the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) are coming up with more restrictive regulations every day and now it is almost impossible to operate any legal business (including exchanges) which involves the transaction of cryptocurrency.

Are the 'bans' affecting strictly businesses or also retailers? I recently read an article about how even peer to peer crypto to fiat transactions weren't allowed in India, but I don't know if that's actually the case.

It's difficult to take any of these articles seriously with how it's either wrongly translated, or intentionally written in a manner so that it is seen as negative. For non Indians it's near impossible to know what's true and what's not.

Even if you actually do some proper research, it's still difficult to figure out what's going on, just think about everything that happened in China throughout the last couple of years. It's one big circus show.

Perhaps they should relocate and dissociate with the Indian market, because regulations there doesn't seem very bright at all. Or perhaps incorporate more p2p transactions into their model.

You've got the central bank of India essentially coming out and making it clear that they're not interested in regulating bitcoin businesses whatsoever, and they'd rather just ban the whole thing. And even though there were several scheduled reviews for regulations, they've all been postponed or delayed.

It's a rushed and badly thought out decision on the regulator's parts in India, but as an exchange, there is nothing you can do about it in terms of the domestic markets especially when you know the direction which the regulations are heading in. Even if an outright ban is not there yet, I wouldn't be surprised if some form of it comes in the future.

Sometimes we tend to use or reason out the cause of the problem on why they're operating a low level of cash for their operations.
Can we also consider a mismanagement or poor management also contributes to the problem of why the company is running low?
A good management finds a way to eliminate the problems, if the company is running low because of the regulators causing its business operations to generate less earnings due to some mandated regulations. They could have work out a solutions like a different income streams of services.

well, I think that more dark days are about to come to every crypto community in India, becouse of this news:

Report: India Considers Complete Ban on Digital Currencies (https://cointelegraph.com/news/report-india-considers-complete-ban-on-digital-currencies)

what makes me more shocked at this is that the government calls they people naive


this is the problem of countries where there are certain governments that have outdated thoughts

Hope Unocoin doesn't shutdown too soon as I still am using this exchange to store my BTC. Few days back only they were talking about introducing ways to enable deposit/withdrawals in INR and now they are removing staff members which is sad. They are not having much volume also and BTC is being sold at 1 lac INR less than the market price due to less buyers/sellers.

This is how an exchange can severely be affected once the government of the country it is doing business is not that very friendly with cryptocurrency and is exerting effort for banks not to cooperate. I am sad for India because this country has a big potential and can easily replace China and Russia easily and its population is quite receptive to new technology judging on its flourishing BPO industry. I am hoping that eventually things can work right with India and that time when come when there would be positive regulations in placed for all players to work with.

When the RBI is not in favor of cryptocurrencies, I don't see anything happening soon in its favor and in this one year, almost all big Indian crypto exchanges have shut down due to no trading volume. Unocoin was my last hope but that's ending soon.