CoinDCX’s users grow 60-fold in just one year amid India’s crypto boom

• CoinDCX hit the milestone of 1 crore users in February, growth of over 60 times within the span of a year.
• In 2021, CoinDCX was the first Indian crypto company to become a unicorn.
• According to co-founder Neeraj Khandelwal, CoinDCX will be looking to grow, not just in India, but also other countries going forward.

CoinDCX, India’s first crypto unicorn, saw explosive growth in users over the past one year. The company claims to have gone from 1.3 lakh users at the end of 2020 to hitting a milestone of 1 crore in February this year. A unicorn, in startup parlance, is a private firm valued at or more than $1 billion.

In the month of January alone, CoinDCX added 23 lakh users to its overall base – that’s nearly a 30% jump after already having grown 60-fold within the span of a year. Overall, it’s a 76x increase amid India’s crypto boom.

The demand for cryptocurrency trading surged not just in India, but globally, during the pandemic with CoinDCX’s peers like WazirX also reporting a 10x jump in users to 1 crore in December last year.

Cofounder Neeraj Khandelwal has hinted that going forward, it will be looking beyond the India market. “We’re proud to continue strengthening our growth in India and beyond, lowering the barriers to make the future of finance more accessible to all,” he said in a statement.

Tax on crypto could keep investors away

CoinDCX has been around for four years. This means it was there when Bitcoin initially emerged in India, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) ban, the Supreme Court (SC) verdict that overturned the ban, the most recent boom on cryptocurrencies in the country and, most recently, the 30% tax on all ‘virtual digital asset’ transactions.

While Gupta, who is also co-chair of Internet and Mobile Association of India’s (IAMAI) Crypto Council, is happy that the government is at least giving some legitimacy to the industry stating, “It gives much needed clarity and confidence to the industry,” does have his concerns.

A 30% tax on cryptocurrency is one of the highest tax rates in the country at par with how lottery and gambling gains are taxed. "I am not saying that every crypto token has a very strong use case but you should not treat it equal to gambling. That would not be the best interpretation in my opinion,” Gupta told Times Now.

The bigger concern is that the tax may lead investors back to the stock market, where the taxes on making a profit are lower. “[It] will spur more and more money coming back to the equity or other financial assets. This structural move has started,” Vikram Kotak, the cofounder and managing partner at Ace Lansdowne Investments, told Business Insider after the Union Budget was announced.

To be fair, CoinDCX has grown beyond simply being a crypto exchange for users. It also has the DCXLearn platform to educate users on cryptocurrencies and blockchain. It also launched an Over-The-Counter (OTC) Desk to tap into the institutional client market for crypto trades — the average ticket size for such services start at over investments worth ₹30 lakh.

SEE ALSO:
Aave's Web3 social network plans to take on Facebook and Twitter by giving users control
Sundar Pichai pegs Google’s Web3 ambitions to the cloud
Ubisoft is joining Google, IBM, Wipro, LG and others on Hedera’s governing council as it doubles down on crypto