Digital assets platform BitGo is in discussions with India’s crypto watchdog to enter its multibillion-dollar local market.
The company has been holding “active conversations” with India’s Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU), BitGo chief operating officer Chen Fang told Cointelegraph during the India Blockchain Week.
The country ranked at the top of Chainalysis’ crypto adoption index in 2024 despite a recent ban on offshore crypto exchanges. Data from Statista foresees India’s crypto market revenue to reach $6.6 billion in 2024.
“We’re currently not in the Indian market,” said Fang. “And we’re, obviously, interested in this market, hence why we are here. There are active conversations between us and the FIU to talk about entering this space.”
India’s projected crypto revenue. Source: Statista
On Nov. 2, BitGo launched a global platform targeting retail clients for the first time since its inception over a decade ago, but offering services to Indians will require full registration as per local laws.
In December 2023, India’s FIU, an agency under the Department of Revenue, classified nine foreign exchanges as non-compliant with the country’s Anti-Money Laundering laws. The label came with a ban on websites and exchanges’ mobile apps.
The ban achieved global platforms such as Binance, HTX, Kraken, Gate.io, KuCoin, Bitstamp, MEXC, Bittrex and Bitfinex. Binance managed to comply with regulatory guidelines eight months later under a $86 million tax penalty.
BitGo is based in California and has 460 employees globally — 150 of them working in its Bangalore office — and now wants to offer its trading and physical custody services to institutional clients within India.
The company claims to serve corporate clients across more than 50 countries, although its physical storage facilities are located in seven jurisdictions, including the United States, Germany, Switzerland, South Korea and Singapore — where it recently obtained a license to operate a crypto exchange.
Related: Binance, WazirX among crypto firms evading taxes in India, says gov’t
Satoshi would be “disappointed” with blockchain industry decentralization
Fang also criticized the level of decentralization across the crypto space, claiming that the Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto would be disappointed by the industry’s current state.
“I think Satoshi would be kind of disappointed looking at the decentralization element specifically,” he said before adding:
If you look carefully at some of the blockchains that are getting a lot of traction, some of these blockchains [are] actually not decentralized. Seriously, ask yourself, who actually controls some of these blockchains? How many sequencers are there?”
Sequencers are responsible for processing and ordering transactions on a blockchain. When there are few sequencers in a network, any single entity may have too much control over users’ transactions.
According to Fang, protocols controlled by one sequencer cannot be called decentralized. “Who controls that sequencer? Oh, the company behind the blockchain controls that sequencer. Is that really a decentralized blockchain? No, it’s not. It’s a public append-only database that has one admin user,” he said.
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