The four major bitcoin exchanges in India are Zebpay, Unocoin, Coinsecure and Bitxoxo.
Bitcoin is easy money and can easily be used for payment without going through too many legalities or regulations.
The value of Bitcoin in India has soared from about Rs 1,10,000 per bitcoin a little over a month ago to Rs 1,90,000 now.
In India, there are a total of one million bitcoin users, with per day transactions of 1,000-2,000 coins. The value of the transactions would be about ₹10-20 crore.
You can send this money abroad at the click of a button and convert it to any currency. And vice versa — you can get paid in Bitcoin and convert that to INR by directly transferring it to your bank. An entire transaction can take under 30 minutes.
The bitcoin exchanges in India had suspended their operations for 36 hours from July 31, to monitor a ‘hard fork’ situation that divided the virtual currency’s online community.
A hard fork situation arose after bitcoin’s blockchain forked, creating another separate cryptocurrency called bitcoin cash (BCH).
There are a number of startups that have opened Bitcoin wallets in India, making it easy to buy Bitcoin in INR.
The first bitcoin cash was mined on August 1, which then started gaining traction.
Last month, miners and developers of bitcoins also agreed to adopt a new way of operating the cryptocurrency, with changes being made to the technology and underlying code.
The exchanges were shut down as most of India’s top bitcoin exchanges did not want to support bitcoin cash or were undecided on the new cryptocurrency. Generally, a bitcoin exchange works round-the-clock.
The new technology for BCH, called ‘Segwit2x’ is being gradually adopted by key players.
However, for the majority of India, dealing in cryptocurrency is still a very nascent concept.
Union finance ministry, NITI Aayog and Reserve Bank is working on a report on whether to regulate and legalise virtual currencies in India.
