Asserted by the Chief Executive Officer of Coinbase that the crypto trading firm has disabled the Unified Payments Interface or UPI trades after receiving informal pressure from The Reserve Bank of India (RBI).
Brain Armstrong said in response, “So a few days after launching, we ended up disabling UPI because of some informal pressure from the Reserve Bank of India, which is kind of the Treasury equivalent there.”
RBI Using ‘Shadowban’ Strategy
Armstrong said, “India is a unique market, in the sense that the Supreme Court has ruled that they can’t ban crypto, but there are elements in the government there, including at the Reserve Bank of India, who don’t seem to be as positive on it.”
Further added, “And so they in the press, it’s been called a shadowban; basically, they’re applying soft pressure behind the scenes to try to disable some of these payments, which might be going through UPI.”
Coinbase Will Be Back
Armstrong believes that Coinbase will make a comeback with decent numbers in India in a short period along with the expansion in other countries as well. Coinbase is planning to expand its operations Internationally similar to India. The company had to suspend the UPI transactions in India, just a few days after the launch in April. For now, there is no option to use UPI payments in the app.
On April 7, the US-based crypto trading firm announced that the users will now be able to add money through the UPI payment system to buy and sell cryptos. But unfortunately for the company, just after few hours, the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) asserted that they had no idea that Crypto trading firms were using UPI.
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Apple Will Not Accept Card Payments For Subscriptions, App Purchases
Coinbase Will Expand In India
For now, the crypto exchange is looking forward to expanding its operation in India and is going to increase the number of working employees four times by the year’s end. This was announced by the CEO in his blog post to add 1000 employees as compared to the existing 300 working professionals.
