City Mumbai Financial News

Mumbai: The worldwide crypto community has lauded India’s announcement to tax cryptocurrencies and develop a blockchain-based, regulator-backed digital currency as a significant step forward toward legitimising the asset class and encouraging innovation in blockchain technology. «This means that India recognises the importance of crypto, digital assets and their underlying technology, blockchain, too,» said Anndy Lian, Chairman of the Singapore-based BigONE exchange. «The next crypto bull market could be led by India.» On February 1, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman announced the government would impose a blanket tax rate of 30% on the transfer of «virtual digital assets.»

New Delhi|Mumbai: India’s central bank may consider other “centralised” technology models apart from blockchain — the popular digital transaction ledger — to host its proposed digital currency, officials and industry experts in the know of the matter told ET.Blockchain may not be the ideal technology due to its massive power consumption, more so in a country like India with its population of 1.3 billion, the sources said.Instead, the Reserve

Mumbai: Nischal Shetty, founder of crypto exchange WazirX, has announced a new blockchain called Shardeum that will compete with others such as Ethereum and Solana. This is one of the first layer-one blockchains being built out of India. Shetty said that unlike other blockchains, Shardeum will solve for scalability and expensive transaction costs, while maintaining a high level of decentralisation, which he said was lacking in most blockchains today. “If you are looking at 200 million people today in crypto worldwide, this will go to a billion people in the future. There is no way the existing blockchains will be able to support that. Sharding is a known solution to solve this problem, which is what Shardeum is built on,” he said.

Mumbai: Tax on cryptocurrencies or virtual digital assets announced on Tuesday is set to create more problems for investors and their tax experts on how to compute gains and taxation. Many tax experts seem to have raised questions about what would happen to the gains made by investors in the past year. That is, whether the announcement on tax will be retrospective. «The concerned amendments are prospective from April 1, 2022. This means that for such transactions till March 31, 2022, taxation should be applicable at normal income tax slab rates or capital gains tax rates (as the case may be) and not the flat 30% rate,» said Sudhir Kapadia, national leader-tax at EY India.

MUMBAI: Legal experts are divided over regulating crypto assets. While one section is advising the government not to take a hasty decision without understanding the use cases, the other is against continuing the status quo despite the difficulty in defining crypto. ICICI Bank’s group general counsel Pramod Rao has said, “The government’s pause (on introducing the crypto bill in Parliament) is a good thing for us to wait and watch, and decide whether we need a separate regulator, which can transcend into all use cases.” However, Cyril Amarchand Mangaldas partner Anu Tiwari said that it will take a few years for a new regulator to attain maturity — which is too long a time for crypto. According to Tiwari, Sebi is the practical choice for regulating crypto despite challenges like identifying issuers of tokens. Presented ByDid you Know?Sunny Leone too

Mumbai: When Vikas Singh bought the first-ever non fungible token (NFT) minted by edtech unicorn founder Gaurav Munjal, he was buying it for its future value. An image of a page from Munjal’s personal diary with Unacademy's vision cost him about Rs 60,000.“Today Unacademy is valued at almost $4 billion.

Mumbai: Indian cryptocurrency exchanges have recorded higher trading volumes in the past few days owing to extreme volatility in the market, as many traders and investors liquidated some of the riskier tokens, rebalanced their portfolios by moving to stable coins and also indulged in opportunistic buying to average down their portfolios. During and after the weekend crash, ET spoke to multiple exchanges to gauge the trading volumes — most recorded higher transaction levels, but a few witnessed a dip too. «We have seen volumes increase by around 15%,» said Avinash Shekhar, co-CEO, ZebPay. A CEO of a top exchange said on condition of anonymity, «We saw a sharp decline in trading volumes during the weekend as most investors were trying to figure out the reasons and consequences of the current dip in crypto.»

Mumbai: Wealthy individuals and their family offices that had bought cryptocurrencies in the last two years have started transferring them to family trusts and wallets outside India as the country drags its feet over cryptocurrency regulations, say tax advisors. In the last two years, many wealthy individuals and family offices had invested in cryptocurrencies.

Mumbai: Indian crypto investors, most of who have jumped on the crypto bandwagon in the past year, are a jittery lot as cryptocurrencies again fell sharply across the board in the past 24 hours following a selloff led by technology stocks in the US on Friday. “I started investing last year after being influenced by friends and business partners,” said Gopala Somani, a Delhi-based crypto investor. “I kept investing even till the last week, thinking it was time to buy the dip. But now I am stuck. My portfolio is down and in the red. If I sell, it will be a significant loss.”Bitcoin was trading at $35,572, while other major altcoins were also down by double digits, at 5 pm, Saturday, on Coinbase. Bitcoin has dropped 17% in the past week, Ethereum 26.66%, Binance Coin 28.74%, Cardano 19.43%, and Solana 31.90%. The popular meme coin, Shiba Inu, dropped 30.03%, while DogeCoin slid 32 % in the past seven days. At 5 pm on Saturday, the Coinable website said the overall market was down 12.19%.

Mumbai: Indian cryptocurrency exchanges are weighing updates to their self-regulatory code of conduct to avoid run-ins with regulators. The move comes amid heightened scrutiny of the sector from regulatory bodies, including the income tax department, enforcement directorate, and others. ET reported on Monday that the government may delay tabling the Cryptocurrency Bill in the upcoming budget session of Parliament as it wants to hold more discussions and build consensus on a regulatory framework for the nascent sector.

The Ethereum upgrade that introduced a partial network fee burning mechanism in August last year has launched on the layer-two scaling network Polygon. 

Asias first cryptocurrency ETF is set to launch in India

IC15 will monitor the performance of the 15 most-traded crypto coins in the world.

Indian crypto exchange WazirX has reportedly paid over $6.6 million (49.2 crore rupees) following non-payment of Goods and Services Tax (GST) on trade commissions. The total recovery includes the pending tax of $5.43 million (40.5 crore rupees), the interest and a penalty for non-payment.

India-based Polygon network has been trending for a while now. Recently the Ethereum-powered network acquired a zero-knowledge (ZK) protocol developer, Mir, for around USD 400 million. Now, it is rolling out a testnet implementation that could possibly hike MATIC by 3X in the current cycle.

Mumbai: Proposed legislation that would ban the use of cryptocurrencies as a method of payment in India also seeks to make those who infringe the law subject to arrest without a warrant and being held without bail, according to a source and a summary of the bill seen by Reuters.

Mumbai: India could see apps like Robinhood emerge in the next few years if cryptocurrencies are classified as an asset class. Nasdaq-listed Robinhood is a mobile app that allows users to conduct commission-free trades of stocks, exchange-traded funds and cryptocurrencies.

Despite India’s unpredictive stance towards crypto regulations, Singaporean crypto exchange Coinstore has allocated a $20 million fund to set up three new offices in the Indian cities of Bangalore, Delhi and Mumbai.

Coinstore has begun operations in India at a time when the Indian government is preparing legislation to effectively bar most private cryptocurrencies. Coinstore has launched its web and app platform and plans branches in Bangalore, New Delhi and Mumbai which will act as its base in India for future expansion, its management said.

Singapore-based virtual currency exchange Coinstore has begun operations in India at a time when the government is preparing legislation to effectively bar most private cryptocurrencies.

Singapore-based virtual currency exchange Coinstore has begun operations in India