India’s Largest Cryptocurrency Exchange Confirms Move To Malta
Zebpay co-founder Sandeep Goenka
Malta’s crypto-friendly regime has seen it woo another major cryptocurrency exchange, this time India’s Zebpay.
Zebpay used to be India’s largest cryptocurrency exchange and had once accounted for half the estimated five million to six million crypto traders in India.
However, it was forced to leave India after the country’s central banking institution, the Reserve Bank of India, last April issued strict directions to banks to stop doing business with crypto-firms. Zebpay disabled rupee deposits and withdrawals and eventually closed its entire exchange service across India, sending tremors across the market.
Its website confirms that it has now incorporated a Maltese company called ‘Awlencan’ and that its new exchange will provide services to residents of 20 European countries, including Malta. In a tweet, parliamentary secretary for the digital economy Silvio Schembri welcomed them to Malta.
Zebpay becomes the latest cryptocurrency exchange to move to Malta ahead of the enacting of the national blockchain laws on 1st November, joining the likes of Binance, OKex BitBay, BigONE.
Its co-founder Sandeep Goenka is a vocal advocate of cryptocurrencies and the blockchain technology underpinning them, comparing its potential to that of the Internet in the early 1990s.
“If you thought in 1994 that the Internet was just a better fax machine, you’d realize today that its the tool which caused the Egypt revolution,” he wrote in an opinion piece for Medium. “And so if you think that bitcoin is just another way to make a payment, time will prove things differently.”
“Just like the Internet, this is an industry which has the power to expand the size of our economy to levels unprecedented in the history of mankind. To increase economic activity across each and every segment of society….This industry that will give the middle and poor class a fighting chance, whose savings and income keeps getting eroded by inflation and debt. As they are caught in a vicious spiral due to the current economic system we live in.”
