Here’s something that might perk up your ears about cryptocurrency — if Tesla founder Elon Musk being bullish about it already hasn’t.
Despite the volatility of the market and the legal grey area, many investors especially youngsters are being drawn towards investing in digital currencies. With easy accessibility to cryptocurrency trading platforms like WaZirX, CoinDCX, Zebpay, the young and the savvy are very into crypto.
The cryptocurrency adoption rate has been outgrowing the Internet’s user growth since 2018.
As highlighted in the chart below, the total number of crypto users is likely to hit the one-billion mark nearly two years faster than the Internet.
(Image Credit: Altramp)
In India, cryptocurrency exchange WazirX has witnessed a massive 2,648 percent growth in new registrations especially from tier 2 and 3 cities in 2021. Women from smaller towns also have higher participation than their urban counterparts in India at WazirX, which has more than 7.3 million users and has clocked over $21.8 billion in trading volume this year to date.
Mumbai-based lawyer Khushboo Anklesaria, 25, said that she has been actively investing in the stock market but took a plunge of investing in crypto this year.
“I did my research, mostly from newspapers and social media,” Anklesaria said. “I also asked for my father’s help as he is a stockbroker and a market analyst.
Only then I went ahead and invested my money. I know for sure that I would get best results five to 10 years down the line.”
Asked why young investors are increasingly getting into crypto, Kunal Barchha, founder of Cryptified Solutions (OPC) Pvt Ltd, said: “The primary reason for youngsters to invest in crypto is volatility. The stable phase of the market is called boring in cryptocurrency. Youngsters want action and they get that easily in cryptocurrency. This entices the younger generation.”
Yash Purohit, one of the founders of Altramp, a news site for cryptocurrency, felt that “transparency is yet another reason for youngsters to invest in crypto. Many private stock firms refrain from sharing their data while the crypto market makes everything available easily on the Internet.”
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Government stance: Grey area
India’s crypto bill has been in the works for over two years now, but no one knows for sure if the government will ban all private cryptocurrencies in the country.
A month ago, the Union finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman had said that the new laws could be up for debate in the Monsoon Session of Parliament. However, the session was truncated.
“There are rumours of private cryptocurrencies being banned, so I have restricted myself from investing further,” said Dipal Parmar, 23, site-reliability engineer in Crest Data Systems from Ahmedabad who started investing last year via WazirX.
The Indian government’s stance on cryptocurrencies has evolved and softened, many believe. The government, although not being in the favour of cryptocurrencies, has now adopted one of its features – which is to facilitate transactions via blockchain. Blockchain technology is developed using complex algorithms and software rules which make it very difficult for an attacker to manipulate, and easier for people to share valuable data securely.
(Image Credit: Altramp)
“With the kind of hype and potential the cryptocurrency has bought in recent times, and with the recent developments in countries like El Salvador, it’s highly likely that coins like Bitcoin, Ether are bound to be accepted as legal tender in the coming future,” said Sagar Varghese, 24, a business analyst from Ahmedabad.
In June 2021, El Salvador declared Bitcoin as a legal currency and became the first country in the world to make it legal tender.
Many comparative studies show that if we compare the user growth of crypto to that of the Internet, we are still in the year 1999 for crypto. And we all know how the Internet exploded after that.
