Coinbase halted UPI Payments for Crypto in India
Coinbase had started the crypto trading in India after waiting for many months but this did not last long because of some conflict issued by the payment aggregator. It was certainly good news couple of days for Indian traders because Coinbase offers world-class infrastructure and their platform is very good to use. Coinbase has been working on it since last year to set up the operation in India to be part of the growing crypto community in India.
Crypto is growing in the world and even India is one of the countries where crypto is growing significantly despite various banking and legal issues. Earlier it was expected that Coinbase will operate in India on the crypto-to-crypto model but the exchange has something unexpected which was very nice. They added UPI as a payment option to deposit fiat and buy crypto. UPI is the leading payment option in India run by NPCI which is a government organization and even NPCI posted a tweet sharing that they do not support crypto purchases using UPI.
This is something that was not expected after the tax rules however this is not the first time when banks are creating troubles for crypto exchanges. Even MobiKwik has disabled the support for crypto exchanges after this tweet by NPCI. Mobikwik is a fin-tech like Paytm and they have never done something like this before with crypto exchanges but finally, they did and it will not be a surprise if some other payment
The UPI is the payment portal governed by the National Payment Corporation of India (NPCI), which facilitates buy orders on Coinbase’s India services. The exchange has already updated its payment method information on its website for Indian users, which urges users to try Immediate Payment Service (IMP) to place sell orders.
Looks like the crypto sector is going to have a tough journey in India even after taxation and it's because payment companies and service providers including banks are still in the same zone. Coinbase has updated that they are working with the relevant authorities to sort out the issue and bring the service back or find a better alternative to start the service soon.
Does it mean that even after the 30% taxation crypto buy is not going to be easy? I think that government needs to intervene because if they are expecting the higher tax collection then they need to provide a crypto-friendly environment so that people can trade with ease and then only tax revenue can be increased. Even some Indian exchanges are going through banking issues and they have stopped instant deposits and transfers because of this issue but few of them are able to provide.
I hope that this issue gets sorted out soon and the Indian crypto community gets the easy option to trade in crypto using the fiat currency as p2p is not that much easy. Since Coinbase is planning big for India so it's likely to happen that they will figure out something to bring back the same experience to the crypto traders/users.
Thank you
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