National Currency, Scam And Police Violence: What's Going On With Crypto In India

India's central bank, the Reserve Bank of India has caused a stir on April 5, 2018 by announcing that it would not allow regulated institutions like banks, payment service providers and non banking finance companies, to provide services to persons or businesses that deal with cryptocurrencies.

After the news of RBI's decision to bar banks from interacting with cryptocurrency entities, Cointelegraph contacted ZebPay for comment, but has not received any response.

What has perplexed a lot of cryptocurrency users in India has been the Indian government's weird double standards on cryptocurrencies.

On one hand the government welcomed the technology behind cryptocurrencies, while on the other discouraged the use of cryptocurrency in the country.

Compounding India's cryptocurrency woes have been two stories that are unrelated to the so called 'crypto ban' but have propelled Bitcoin into the news cycle.

These stories do cryptocurrency in India no favour as the local media often takes a frenzied tone on these matters and indulges in sensationalism.

The Blockchain economy has its roots in cryptocurrency but also a lot of Blockchain tech firms are rich and store their wealth in cryptocurrencies.

There are already some indications that major cryptocurrency companies in India are thinking of abandoning the country.

It's important to remember about the Reserve Bank ambitions towards the idea of its own cryptocurrency, named after the Indian goddess of wealth Laxmi.

Indians can still trade in cryptocurrencies by using popular peer-to-peer systems like Bisq and localbitcoins or by simply exchanging Bitcoin for fiat with their local dealers.